This thesis describes and analyses patterns of complementation and auxiliation in the languages spoken in an understudied area of Italy, namely Southern Lazio. From a descriptive perspective, this thesis serves to document several severely endangered Romance languages spoken in the Italian peninsula. In so doing, several previously undocumented complementizer and auxiliary systems are illustrated for the first time. From a theoretical perspective, this thesis accounts for the patterns of variation found in these auxiliary and complementizer systems. Traditional descriptions of Italo- Romance treat these systems as entirely unrelated. Indeed, to date, no previous study has compared the distribution of complementizers and auxiliaries in Italo-Romance to investigate similarities and correspondences between them. This dissertation takes the original step of demonstrating that the distribution of particular auxiliary systems correlates with the distribution of particular complementizer systems, offering, in turn, an integrated and complementary theoretical analysis of both phenomena.

This study examines the distribution and the status of the izāfa particle in Sorani Kurdish (Central Kurdish). It uses a corpus-based analysis to investigate the forms and the pattern of distribution of the izāfa particle in Sorani, a dominant dialect of Kurdish among the Western Iranian languages. The study details an investigation of the appearance of izāfa in various NPs using a variety of data mostly from the corpus but supplemented by the grammaticality judgments of native speakers. I show that next to parallel properties seen in other Western Iranian languages, Sorani Kurdish izāfa shows a form alternation. I examine the morphological status of the izāfa and other nominal morphological features in Kurdish as well as the sensitivity of izāfa form variation to specificity in Kurdish NPs. I argue that the differences and distributional incoherence of the izāfa within Sorani and across Western Iranian languages calls for a morphomic approach, which can be formally described using a constructional approach to grammar. The study focuses on the following questions: What type of head does the izāfa mark? What is the function of this marker? What are the constraints on its distribution? What are the syntactic and morphological rules governing its distribution?

This dissertation provides a formal and functional analysis of grammatical voice in Sasak, an Austronesian language spoken in Eastern Indonesia. The research addresses two primary questions, which are (1) how does Sasak clause structure and morphosyntax vary across dialects? and (2) what shapes speakers’ syntactic production, namely grammatical voice choices? Answers to these questions are pursued via elicitation data, a corpus analysis, and results of two language production experiments. The first part of the dissertation examines how Sasak dialects differ syntactically and morphosyntactically. Data from embedded clauses, clitics, and possessive pronominal clitics are used to argue that that Central Sasak maintains two distinct transitive clause types despite the lack of the overt morphological contrast found with transitive verbs in Eastern Sasak. These data also support prior arguments (Davies, 1993; Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis, 1992; Shibatani, 2008) that Indonesian languages have either two grammatical subject positions, or both a subject and grammatical topic position in the case of Sasak. Many Austronesian languages spoken on Indonesia’s Java Island and surrounding islands share a cognate nasal prefix that is generally found in the presence of preverbal actors (Arka, 2009; Davies, 2005; Sneddon, 1996). This dissertation presents data from three Sasak dialects that show how multiple, morphologically distinct nasal prefixes in Sasak dialects (also noted by Austin, 2012) correlate with two syntactic facts: first, what argument may be extracted out of vP; and secondly, whether or not the lexical verb projects an internal argument. These facts are accounted for in a Minimalist framework (Chomsky, 1993, 2001) by permitting variation to target single features on syntactic heads (as proposed by Aldridge, 2008). The second half of the dissertation investigates what factors shape speakers’ grammatical voice choices. Speakers’ production patterns can clearly be understood as shaped by the structural properties of their specific language(s), and this is also true in Sasak. However, what about when multiple word orders and voice choices are possible? When languages allow for syntactic options, are there universal non-syntactic constraints that exert influence on the production and syntactic coding choices? This dissertation explores potential universal biases identified in literature that has grown out of Bock and Warren’s (1985:50) work on Conceptual Accessibility, or the “ease with which the mental representation of some potential referent can be activated in, or retrieved from, memory”. The specific biases examined for Sasak in the current work are Discourse Topicality (Givón, 1983), animacy (Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008), and noun phrase length (MacDonald, 2013; Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). Results of a corpus analysis are combined with data from two production experiments, and show that both animacy and topicality affect voice selection in Sasak. Specifically, [+animate] and [+topical] noun phrases are produced earlier in a sentence, thereby affecting the grammatical voice produced. Also, Sasak speakers exhibit a ‘long before short’ bias (i.e., placing longer noun phrases before relatively shorter ones in utterances), affecting voice selection as well. Contextualized in cross-linguistic data, this supports the argument made in this dissertation that the cognitive effect of the semantic richness and salience of longer nouns is relative to the speaker’s stage in planning and producing an utterance.

<p>Traditionellt har tempusböjning och person-/numeruskongruens på verb varit de starkaste kriterierna för finithet. Det har dock visat sig vara svårapplicerade kriterier för många språk och finithet på satsnivå – huruvida en sats är självständig eller ej – har blivit en viktig fråga för definitionen.</p><p>Uppsatsen syftar till att beskriva och analysera finithetsfenomenet utifrån språket trumaí.</p><p>Det tycks finnas flera fenomen som är tecken på en finithetsdistinktion i trumaí, framför allt -n/-e-klitikan som markerar 3Abs på verbet vid absolutivargumentets frånvaro, samt FT-partiklarna som har en tempusfunktion. För imperativ verkar det vara så att imperativpartiklarna har en intern distribution baserad på person och animathet hos absolutivargumentet, vilket kan tolkas som att det finns en argumentkongruens frikopplad från den semantiska inkorporeringen av andraperson som subjekt. Gällande finithet på satsnivå finns det i trumaí både finita och infinita satser som kan fungera som bisatser. I strukturer där verbet beter sig prototypiskt är satsen finit, medan andra strukturers verb tycks ha rört sig mot att bete sig nominellt, varpå satsen fungerar annorlunda och är infinit.</p>

This study investigates the morphosyntactic competence of advanced ESL learners and native speakers of English. Using the framework of the Government and Binding approach (Chomsky,1981, 1986), the study tests the predictions made by the evolved Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 2009), namely that the grammars of advanced L2 learners are unreliable(where reliability means converging to the L2 grammar), non-convergent to the L2 grammar, and characteristic of patches (where patches are extragrammatical principles independent of the normal syntactic processes). The participants of the study were tested on three tasks (timed grammaticality judgment task, a correction task, and a preference task). The findings of the study indicate that the difference between the morphosyntactic competence of the advanced ESL learners and that of native speakers is gradient rather than categorical.

This study investigates the morphosyntactic competence of advanced ESL learners and native speakers of English. Using the framework of the Government and Binding approach (Chomsky,1981, 1986), the study tests the predictions made by the evolved Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman, 2009), namely that the grammars of advanced L2 learners are unreliable(where reliability means converging to the L2 grammar), non-convergent to the L2 grammar, and characteristic of patches (where patches are extragrammatical principles independent of the normal syntactic processes). The participants of the study were tested on three tasks (timed grammaticality judgment task, a correction task, and a preference task). The findings of the study indicate that the difference between the morphosyntactic competence of the advanced ESL learners and that of native speakers is gradient rather than categorical.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Šiame darbe analizuojamas sakinio sandaros ir turinio pamatą sudarantys dviejų skirtingo tipo kalbų sintaksiniai predikatai ir jų struktūrinių tipų morfosintaksinis realizavimas daug tyrinėtas anglų kalbos gramatikos darbuose, tačiau ligi šiol mažai aptartas lietuvių kalbos moksliniuose techniniuose tekstuose. Sintaksinio predikato pamatas negali būti vertinamas tik funkciniu požiūriu. Labai svarbus veiksmažodžio (SP) struktūrinės sandaros vertinimas, lemiantis sintaksinės struktūros specifiką, kai veiksmažodis (SP) skaidomas iš vidaus (pvz., pagrindas [head] ir priklausomi rodikliai, linksniai). Veiksmažodžio sandara taip pat turi ir morfologinių, ir sintaksinių aspektų. / The predicate constitutes the basis of a sentence structure and content. The predicate has been researched at length and in depth in the works of English grammars, but is still little discussed in Lithuanian academic works, especially in those concerning scientific and technical texts. The structure of the predicate cannot be approached only functionally. The characterization of the internal division and morphosyntactic structure of the verb as the predicate is quite challenging (e.g. the verb as the head and affixes as dependent indicators in the VP). Accordingly, the morphosyntactic expression of a verb form and the structure inside the predicate is very complicated.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-290). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xii, 290 leaves, bound ill., maps 29 cm

Zugl.: Zürich, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2009