Causatives are a valence increasing operation that adds a causer argument which acts upon causee to perform an event. However, as Dixon (2000) states, it is not enough to merely say that causatives increase valence. There are other morpho-syntactic considerationsm which must be examined, as well as those typological and semantic. Causativeness can be expressed in many different ways; morphological processes, periphrastic construction, etc. In Quechua, the bound morpheme '-chi' is added for causativization. While there has been much analysis of Quechua, little has been produced on the role and manifestation of the causative, and even less has been done on the causative in the Cuzco dialect of Quechua (CQ). It is the intent of this paper to present a systematic analysis of causation in CQ. I explore the morpho-syntactic implications of the '-chi', as well as the typological and semantic considerations. I analyze and discuss the effects of causativeness on intransitive, transitive and ditransitive verbs, based on Hale & Keyser (1993) and Baker (1988). I also examined the use of '-chi' in double causative and the impersonal construction of CQ. Furthermore, I classify CQ's causative in a typology based on Song (1996). Lastly, I provided an in-depth analysis of the semantic implications of the causative based on Dixon (2000). From these analyses, I have compiled an in-depth look investigation of the role and manifestation of the causative in CQ. This work is motivated by the lack of critical analyses produced in regards to these less investigated areas of CQ.

Discourse in World of Warcraft poses interesting insights for the organization of conversation in text-only mediums. In my work, I show how online discourse can be analyzed using the traditional tools of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1996). By analyzing logs of chat from within the game world, I show how turns are constructed, paying particular attention to the construction of multiple-message turns. I draw on the insights of Turn Construction Unit Continuation theory (Schegloff, 1996; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007) to illuminate the construction of these complex turns, and I show how the tools of Cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) can be used to link parts of a turn together. Finally, I show how participants in World of Warcraft use different kinds of repair functions in the discourse, namely *-repair for typographical errors and an in-group feature get out of my head! for overlap. Online discourse has unique and particular forms of organization, but can be analyzed in the same manner as spoken language; far from being a random and corrupted form of written language, online language use is regular and organized.

Classifiers in spoken languages are generally viewed as overt morphemes within a noun phrase that serve to classify referents according to real or imputed characteristics. A 'classifier language' is so designated because it has classifier constructions, which are believed to comprise a morphosyntactic subsystem in these languages. Controversy surrounds many aspects of classifiers in spoken language. Classifiers in signed languages are, perhaps, even more controversial. Classifiers in signed languages have been categorized in a variety of ways, and some researchers debate the term, as well as their very existence. Although the terminology has been questioned, it is believed that classifiers are frequent in all signed languages, including American Sign Language. Corpora have been implemented in a variety of useful ways in spoken languages, while corpus studies in signed languages are a relatively fledgling endeavor. This study used a corpus of narratives in American Sign Language from the National Center for Sign Language and Gesture Resources (NCSLGR) to determine how frequent classifier constructions are in narrative discourse, compared to other items. Every item in the corpus was counted. Counts were taken within several individual categories, in order to compare the percentage of classifier constructions, as well as classifier types. Classifier constructions were found to comprise 7.68% of total items in the corpus. The four most frequently occurring types of classifier in the corpus are: semantic classifiers, instrument classifiers, body classifiers, and descriptive classifiers. A variety of issues may affect the percentage of classifier constructions, as well as the classifier types used, including participants, sample size, and the type of discourse involved. It is hoped that that frequency information of this kind will lead to better description, and improved typology of classifiers in signed languages.

Gender violence appears to have entered the Argentinean media spotlight, as demonstrated by the increasing amount of press coverage dealing with different types of male aggression on women. In my work, I study the representation that three national newspapers in Argentina, i.e. Página 12, La Nación and Crítica de la Argentina, make on cases of physical violence against women by men. I draw on critical discourse analysis and critical gender studies to move from the linguistic form into the ideological content of the texts. In particular, I follow an analytical heuristic that focuses on the 'naming', 'voicing' and 'agency' devices employed by the journalists in order to arrive at the gender ideologies that support the language surface. Five out of six ideologies correspond to a patriarchal discourse which (1) deems poor women more prone to the violence, (2) holds women silent and passive in the face of male abuse, (3) blames women for the violence they suffer from, (4) views women as disposable objects, and (5) punishes women for breaching the public/private divide. A sixth ideology was also revealed in some of the articles. Ideology (6) challenges the patriarchy-based ideologies by establishing that women are not inferior to men, and consequently, women's emancipation from violent men must be fostered. The driving force behind my study of press representations of gender violence in Argentina springs from the conception of language as social action. Overall, this thesis stands as a work which demonstrates the value of media literacy, a movement that falls within the realm of "educommunication", which promotes a critical stance before the media messages around us.

Sociolinguists have claimed that a relationship exists between language and power. That being said, past studies addressing language and power have been concerned with issues of how language and power are created and maintained in face-to-face conversation (e.g., Brown & Gilman, 2003; Kiesling, 1996) and the role that institutions play in creating power roles and powerful language (e.g., Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2003; Fishman, 2006). Kiesling (1996) proposes a framework for studying language and power in face-to-face conversation in which he theorizes that people place themselves in certain power roles by using language to index these roles; however, every speaker cannot simply use any strategy or form to index any role. They are limited by ascribed traits, previous roles they have filled in the community, the roles available in the situation, and their competence in a certain strategy or form (Kiesling, 1996, p. 41). The purpose of the current study will be to adapt Kieslings power framework to the study of language and power within virtual communities in order to explore the following research questions: 1) How is power defined in World of Warcraft?, 2) What are the power roles within World of Warcraft?, 3) How does a players use of language create or reflect the power role(s) that they occupy within World of Warcraft?, and 4) Can language be used to create power ex nihilo or does language use reflect the power that an individual has according to their power roles? The answers to these research questions reveal that participants within World of Warcraft have a variety of beliefs about power, power roles, and powerful language. Additionally, participants may use language to both create powerful positions and reflect powerful positions that they already have.

In this dissertation, the main assumptions in the Shallow Structure Hypothesis, developed by Clahsen & Felser (2006), are evaluated to determine whether the performance of second language (L2) learners when parsing sentences in the target language is fundamentally different. First, the claim that L2 learners do not employ phrase structure heuristics is assessed with stimuli made up of transitively- and intransitively-biased verbs followed by a noun phrase (Traxler, 2005). The second claim evaluated is that L2 learners do not use structurally defined gaps. This hypothesis is tested by comparing the learners' reading performance of intermediate gaps, stimuli with garden path effects and genitive nominalizations. The third assumption tested involves the use of configurational (binding) principles (Chomsky, 1981) in the parsing of cataphoric reference. The performance of L2 learners of English from Spanish and Chinese backgrounds is compared to that of native English speakers using the moving window paradigm. The relative influence of WM on the processing of these structures was also measured. Results show that both native and non-native speakers present similar parsing profiles and do make use of parsing heuristics. At the same time, both native speakers and L2 learners present difficulties accessing other kinds of structural information and resort instead to other clues that may render 'good-enough' representations (Ferreira et al., 2002). A pervasive finding as regards the WM capacity in L2 learners is the relationship found between the ability to store words and grammatical proficiency in a version of the reading span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980).

Many participants in computer-mediated discourse use textually described actions as tools for interaction and the creation and display of identities. In particular, members of online fan communities use textually described actions to embody virtual space in order to construct a shared identity of mutual intimacy. In this study I demonstrate the typical structure of textually described actions, using discourse data collected from three fan communities and responses to an anonymous survey. I then show how these fans use textually described actions to embody virtual space as mimicking the physical world but lacking key barriers and restraints to interaction, such as real-world distance, online communication lag time, and possibility or visibility of the action in the physical world. Using one portion of the discourse data, I illustrate how these fans, who share a high-involvement style of interaction (Tannen, 1984), utilize textually described actions to index emotional stances. These stances and the embodied virtual space are combined to construct a shared identity of a close community in which members interact with great emotional and (virtual) physical intimacy.

It has been acknowledged that using a varied vocabulary is tied to academic success. While most studies concerning vocabulary use and acquisition consider only a student's first language (L1), this study includes the educational and linguistic backgrounds from two groups that share an L1, Arabic. By examining the written texts of Libyan and Saudi Arabian students who come from very different educational and linguistic backgrounds, we can begin to better understand what influences vocabulary acquisition and use. In the present study, it was hypothesized that, due to their exposure to English and Romance languages, the Libyan ESL students should use a richer vocabulary than the Saudi Arabian students. To gauge the students' lexical richness, various measures were employed; the Type/Token ratio (TTR), the Guiraud Index, the Lexical Frequency Profiler (LFP). The students' scores from the Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP) test were also considered. Libyan students scored significantly higher on the MTELP test but had lower mean scores of lexical richness. Counter to the hypothesis, data suggested that Saudi Arabian students used more low-frequency words than their Libyan counterparts. It was suggested that motivation may be an important factor in learning and using vocabulary and the Saudi Arabian students, cognizant of not knowing vocabulary, work harder at learning it.

Speakers of other languages often have trouble learning the article system in English. This study traces the development of six learners, three Arabic speakers whose first language (L1) has articles and three Chinese speakers whose L1 does not. The study follows how learners use articles and maps that usage onto Huebners (1983) semantic wheel to see their interlanguage form-function relationships with articles. Short spontaneous speeches by two groups of learners over the course of a year were used to see if the learners L1 affects their development (Master, 1997; Zobl, 1982). Articles are examined in the context of the noun phrase in which they appear (Liu & Gleason, 2002; Huebner, 1983; Parrish, 1987; Robertson, 2000) and the countability of the noun phrase is also considered (Hiki, 1990). It was found that the Arabic speakers were more accurate in their use of the and ¨, but the Chinese were more accurate with a(n). Overall, there are few differences between the target-like use of the two groups and this is hypothesized to be due to neither Arabic nor Chinese having an indefinite article (Kharma, 1981; Thompson-Panos & Thomas-Ruþiã, 1983; Roberston, 2000). However, because Arabic has a definite article while Chinese does not, the Arabic speakers seem to develop a more target-like representation of the earlier than the Chinese speakers. The Chinese speakers confirmed acquisition stages proposed by Thomas (1989), while the Arabic speakers seem to associate a in introductory contexts (I had a friend named Tom) before existential contexts (That is a truck) and this is hypothesized to be a result of L1 transfer. This study concludes by illustrating the development using Huebners semantic wheel to map out both groups form-function relationships over time (Butler, 2002; Huebner, 1983) and suggesting that the article acquisition stages proposed are not as universal as previously thought (Master, 1995; Thomas, 1989), but actually differ based on features in the learners L1.

Within the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), research into vocabulary acquisition has attained great prominence in recent years. A great emphasis has been placed on the need to measure vocabulary knowledge of second language learners in terms of both depth and breadth. Corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Academic Word List (AWL), have been used to determine which words learners must attain knowledge of for their specific needs. English as a second language (ESL) programs must determine whether learners have knowledge of these words or facilitate their learning. Researchers have utilized quantitative methods to measure both breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Fewer studies have taken an ethnographic approach to provide information about how words are learned. Ethnographic methods can provide an insight into the learning and teaching of vocabulary which quantitative methods alone cannot account for. This thesis employs qualitative methods to examine the implementation of a rigorous vocabulary curriculum as well as student and teacher perceptions of the implementation. 50 AWL words were taught across the curriculum over the course of a three-month term to full-time ESL students in an intensive ESL program. Data was collected through classroom observations, questionnaires, and interviews. In addition, initial learning outcomes were measured by a pretest and posttest, though this was not the focus of the study. The findings show that an average of more than 2 hours a week was spent explicitly teaching the weekly AWL words. Writing original sentences appeared to be the most common exercise type. The students were generally satisfied with the curriculum, though they expressed the need for skill-specific activities with the core words. The teachers generally thought the curriculum had potential but felt that better coordination was needed. The pretest and posttest revealed that the majority of the students were able to write a syntactically and semantically accurate sentence for a slight majority of the 50 words. These results suggest that learning and teaching vocabulary is much more difficult than one would expect.