Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-171).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-226).

University, Diss., 2004--Köln.

This thesis uses an experimental approach to explore optimal gender assignment theory, an approach to gender assignment housed in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004). Optimal gender assignment theory was proposed by Curt Rice (2006) and stipulates that grammatical gender is assigned based on a set of crucially non-ranked gender features constraints and markedness constraints. Thirty-seven participants who were bilingual in English and German received 40 sentences containing English loanwords with the definite article removed and asked to provide the appropriate gender marker and a lexical equivalency. The study found that the constraints employed and developed for optimal gender assignment theory are not applicable to English loanwords in German.

No description available.

No description available.

The majority of scholars’ work on code-switching within the sociolinguistic approach of Arabic has been mainly concentrated on the interaction of the Standard variety with other regional dialects in indigenous communities (Albirini, 2011; Bassiouney, 2006; Saeed, 1997; Soliman, 2008). Their work also extends to include the interaction of Arabic with other languages in informal and highly interactional settings (Abalhassan and Alshalawi, 2000; Safi, 1992; Sayahi, 2014). When it comes to the religious settings, their work has been solely devoted to Standard Arabic and Dialectal Arabic in Arabic countries and among Arabic native speakers (Albirini, 2011; Bassiouney, 2006; Saeed, 1997; Soliman, 2008). This thesis, in turn, investigates CS between Arabic and English in highly formal religious settings in the United States and among American Islamic preachers, non-native speakers of Arabic. It aims to enumerate the social functions of CS between English and Arabic and provides the internal optimal bilingual grammar of these speakers. To achieve these goals, two analyses have been conducted, the functional analysis and the optimality-theoretic analysis. The results of the first analysis revealed that preachers chiefly switch from English to Arabic for eight functions: (1) to use formulaic expressions; (2) to introduce direct quotations; (3) to show a level of education in the Islamic studies; (4) to show a level of education in the Arabic language; (5) to evoke Muslimness and Islamic affiliation; (6) to mark emphasis; (7) to stress the importance of a speech segment; and (8) to introduce rhyming stretches. On the other hand, they switch from Arabic to English mainly to fulfill two functions: (1) to translate the previous Arabic stretch; and (2) to simplify, explain, and clarify a segment that was previously mentioned in Arabic. The result of the optimality-theoretic analysis showed that the internal optimal bilingual grammar of American preachers is {FAITH, FACE} >> PERSPECTIVE >> {SOLIDARITY, POWER}.

Rejecting approaches with a directionality parameter, mainstream minimalism has adopted the notion of strict (or unidirectional) branching. Within optimality theory however, constraints have recently been proposed that presuppose that the branching direction scheme is language specific. I show that a syntactic analysis of Chechen word order and relative clauses using strict branching and movement triggered by feature checking seems very unlikely, whereas a directionality approach works well. I argue in favor of a mixed directionality approach for Chechen, where the branching direction scheme depends on the phrase type. This observation leads to the introduction of context variants of existing markedness constraints, in order to describe the branching processes in terms of optimality theory. The paper discusses how and where the optimality theory selection of the branching directions can be implemented within a minimalist derivation.

Thesis supervisor: Catherine O. Ringen. Thesis supervisor: Jill N. Beckman. Includes bibliographic references (p. 215-220).

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts