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Based on two typological frameworks (Dahl, 1979 and Miestamo, 2007), I explore the various strategies used to negate declarative verbal main clauses (standard negation) in 28 languages in order to investigate the correlation between them and basic word order. The 28 languages are divided into three groups according to their basic word order as follows: 11 SOV, 10 SVO and 7 VSO. As much as possible, I have included languages from different language families and different geographical areas in order to eliminate the effect of genetic relationships and borrowings. The results suggest that negative strategies are probably morphological, where the negator is an affix, in SOV languages and frequently syntactic, where the negator is an independent morpheme, in SVO and VSO languages. I also show that symmetric negation, where no structural differences are observed between affirmatives and negatives other than the negative marker (s), is the most common type cross-linguistically.

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Within the framework of Government-Binding Theory, this thesis argues that the Germanic languages, including German and related languages, should be analyzed as having INFL-second underlying work order. Contrary to traditional generative treatments of the so-called "verb-second" (V2) phenomenon, it is claimed here, in light of certain subtle asymmetries, that the final target site of the moved verb is INFL (I$ sp0)$ in sentences with pre-verbal subjects and COMP (C$ sp0)$ in those with pre-verbal non-subjects. / It is further maintained that an analysis, as modified and extended in the thesis, in which verb movement is triggered by the Empty Category Principle (ECP) is superior, on both conceptual and empirical grounds, to other theories advanced by generativists to date. A wide variety of clause types in the modern Germanic languages, including in particular German V2 complements and Icelandic infinitival complements, are examined, the final chapter being devoted to a proposal concerning German "parentheticals".

Previous investigations of the phenomenon of preferred adjective order in English have overlooked or ignored the influence of rhythmic stress in language recall. The importance of researching this dimension becomes evident when one attempts to understand preferred adjective order cross-culturally, particularly in languages such as Spanish and French where adjective order is flexible, but rhythmic stress is not. The hypothesis of the present experiment, that the nonstressed word of a phrase would be a better cue than the stressed word for the rest of the phrase was not substantiated. However, the finding that first word stress during input was the most relevant variable with respect to recalling phrases has important implications for speech perception and first language learning. In effect, the data suggest that the acoustical marker of first word stress constitute a perceptual strategy which is primary in learning English. The data are not comprehensive enough to generalize this principle to other languages, but certainly suggest the value of investigating such a possibility. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

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Some scholars say that Russian syntax has free word order. However, other researchers claim that the basic word order of Russian is Subject, Verb, Object (SVO). Some researchers also assert that the use of different word orders may be influenced by various factors, including positions of discourse topic and focus, and register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic). In addition, corpora have been shown to be useful tools in gathering empirical linguistic data, and modern advances in computing have made corpora freely available and their use widespread. The Russian National Corpus is a large corpus of Russian that is widely used and well suited to syntactic research. This thesis aims to answer three research questions: 1) If all six word orders in Russian are possible, what frequencies of each order will I find in a data sample from the Russian National Corpus? 2) Do the positions of discourse topic and focus influence word order variations? 3) Does register (spoken, fiction, academic, non-academic) influence word order variations? A sample of 500 transitive sentences was gathered from the Russian National Corpus and each one was analyzed for its word order, discourse pattern, and register. Results found that a majority of the sentences were SVO. Additionally, a majority of the sample contained the topic before the focus, and most of the sample were from the non-academic register. A chi-square analysis for each research question showed statistically significant results. This indicates that the results were not a product of chance, and that discourse patterns and register influence word order variations. These findings provide evidence that there is a predominant word order in Russian.

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This thesis examines the influence of definiteness and movement on Mohawk free word order from the perspective of Government and Binding Theory. On the one hand, Mohawk data show that the relative order of NP's with respect to the verb does not determine definiteness and that the particle ne is not a definite determiner, the language lacking this type of "pure" marker for this feature, all of which contradicts previous claims. It is argued that pragmatic considerations will determine the interpretation of nominals. On the other hand, the evidence shows that there is no movement operation in the production of free word order in Mohawk, unlike in other scrambling languages. The evidence is accounted for by the fact that NP's are base generated in adjunct position (Baker 1991a) and coindexed with pro's in argument position which are licensed by the rich agreement morphology on the verb.

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