This dissertation develops a theory of minimality and foot structure in metrical phonology and prosodic morphology. Central to the theory is the proposal that whether foot structures may be satisfied by a minimum of phonological content is determined by specifying binary values for a new parameter, the Minimal Structure Parameter. The theory of minimality is embedded within a larger theory of prosody which construes metrical footing as mapping to templates. Under this view, metrical templates are subject to the same universal principles, for example Template Satisfaction and Maximization of Association, which constrain association to templates in morphological foot mapping and syllabification. The dissertation argues that the Minimal Structure Parameter together with these principles provides not only a uniform account of diverse metrical phenomena, but offers in addition a principled treatment of an unexpected parallel between metrical and morphological systems: morphological foot structures as well as those in metrical systems may permit subcanonical exemplars of feet. In addition to the parallel just noted, the dissertation finds two differences between metrical and morphological foot structures. First, while metrical feet must specify head elements, morphological feet do not require them. One argument is based on templatic asymmetries between metrical and morphological surface foot inventories. The occurrence of certain foot structures in metrical systems but not in morphology (e.g. trisyllabic feet [σ σ σ], Revised Obligatory Branching feet [σμμ σ]) is explained under the theory of minimality and headship developed within. Second, the minimal constraint on metrical feet is either one or two morae, whereas the minimum for subcanonical feet in morphology is two morae. This is also made to follow from the head/no-head distinction: a metrical foot can be no smaller than the smallest head permitted by the language. In morphology where feet do not specify heads, Minimal Structure defaults to the universal inventory of feet and imposes as the minimal criterion the smallest foot template defined by UG--the bimoraic foot. This work contributes to prosodic theory in (i) aligning theory with data, (ii) aligning metrical theory in particular with theories of templates in morphology and syllabification, and (iii) defining more precisely one constraint on templatic association.

This dissertation is a developmental investigation of early child English negative constructions using 'no' and 'not' in an interpreted Unification Categorial Grammar (UCG). We ask (1) What is the developmental relationship between adult and child negative utterances? (2) What is the optimal characterization of the developmental correspondence between formal grammatical negative structures and their interpretive uses? and (3) How can the temporal dynamics of this developmental correspondence between form and use be rationally accounted for? A discourse analysis of child English negation reveals that young children like adult speakers use 'no' neither as a suppletive alternant for 'not' nor as an auxiliary, as is commonly assumed. Nor is the common assumption that young children use 'not' solely as a sentence negation operator true. Young children use 'no' either as a determiner in descriptive colloquial negative nps and copular np predicates, or as a metalinguistic exclamatory negation operator. 'Not' is a polycategorial negative operator used in both colloquial negatives and (internal) sentence negation. We argue that the child negation system is highly similar to the adult colloquial negation system. We present a colloquial negation fragment in which we treat the interpretation of colloquial negation as a function of model structure rather than underlying categorial structure. This is done by using contextual functions to derive different interpretive functions and making these interpretations available for translations of elliptical negatives in discourse. This approach to child language interpretation is natural to UCG where the interesting connections between categorial, semantic, and pragmatic information can be explicitly described for each well-formed expression of a (child) language. This dissertation also investigates how UCG can be exploited as a theory of language development. The Categorial Complexity Hypothesis (CCH) states that children produce the simpler categories of the target language in their utterances before they produce the more complex ones in their utterances. When applied to UCG, the hypothesis states that the progressive development in children's negative utterances follows the partial ordering of categories based on the complexity of their descriptions. We discuss two predictions made by the CCH and evaluate them using child English spontaneous speech data from three children.

This dissertation investigated the process of lexical access in spoken word production by using a picture naming task which involves very similar processes. Experiment 1 showed that significant repetition priming effect was obtained in this task when the prime was heavily masked and was unavailable to conscious report. In addition, the repetition effect was independent of word frequency. However, a pattern of frequency attenuated priming effects was obtained in Experiment 2 when the prime was unmasked and was named about 10 minutes previously. These results suggest that the masked repetition effect is lexical in nature, whereas the unmasked effect is contaminated by non-lexical sources, such as auditory episodic memory. Experiment 3 showed that the masked repetition effect was independent of the neighborhood density of target names, but the masked form-priming effect was highly constrained by the density. Further, Experiment 4 showed that once the form-related prime became phonologically identical to the picture name the form-priming effect was no longer constrained by the density. In order to distinguish which processing component (lexicalization or production) was responsible for the elimination of the constraint, a picture-fragment matching task was used. Experiment 5A showed that in the matching task, repetition effects were significant and independent of neighborhood density. In contrast with Experiment 4, Experiment 5B showed that the form-priming effect was highly constrained by the density in the matching task. These experiments suggest that (1) the process of phonological encoding is automatic and extremely fast; and (2) the phonological encoding is a necessary process for production but not for lexicalization. In addition, no masked associative priming was obtained in either a picture naming task (Experiment 6) or a picture categorization task (Experiment 7), suggesting that masked priming effects obtained in the present picture processing tasks were not due to facilitation occurring at the semantic or conceptual level. Finally, the robust frequency effects established in picture naming tasks were severely weakened when a picture-fragment matching task was used (Experiment 8). This pattern of results suggests that frequency influences mainly name production rather than name retrieval in picture naming.

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