Studies of African American English (AAE) structure have historically placed significantemphasis on its system of tense and aspect, and have done so for good reason. In the interest of developing a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the variety’s syntactic and semantic features, research on the syntactic constructions and functional grammatical items that distinguish it from other English varieties continues to bring about new insights into the different elements that make up a system of tense and aspect, as well as how these elements interact with other parts of the grammar—not only in AAE but crosslinguistically. One of these elements is the verbal marker <i>BIN</i>, which situates part of an event in the remote past, as shown in (1).<div><br></div><div>(1) Jane <i>BIN</i> saw that movie.</div><div>‘Jane saw that movie a long time ago.’<br></div><div><br></div><div>This paper further investigates both the function of and restrictions on the aspectual marker <i>BIN </i>in African American English (AAE) using acceptability judgment data collected in an online survey of AAE speakers. With this study, I aim to contribute to thetheoretical description of the verbal system of AAE (L. J. Green, 1993) and its system of tense and aspect. The judgment task will identify patterns of acceptability surrounding the following two factors: event type and whether the verb receives progressive or past tense marking. Using a generative-constructivist semantic framework (Ramchand, 2008), I hypothesize that the semantic information represented by the aspectual marker BIN will either allow or disallow certain combinations of event structure and progressiveness, and these restrictions may be demonstrated to be systematic according to the erb classes proposed byRamchand (2008). Additionally, based on the survey data and the approach to the decomposition of event structure regarding Outer and Inner aspect proposed by (Travis, 2010), I will propose that restrictions on <i>BIN </i>and ambiguity between structures containing<i> BIN </i>can be accounted for syntactically based on the configurations of both grammatical and lexical aspect.<br></div><div><br></div>

This thesis explores the nature of linguistic introspection through the phenomenon known in the literature as the Syntactic Satiation Effect, where the perceived unacceptability of some syntactic structures is attenuated on repeated exposure. Recent findings suggest that rating change in experimental settings may not reveal the underlying grammatical status of syntactic objects by mitigating performance factors related to memory limitations, as initially proposed, but rather arise as a response bias conditioned by characteristics of some experimental designs, in effect introducing task-based performance factors. Findings from rating and reading times suggest that there is evidence supporting both accounts of rating change in experimental designs and highlights areas of development for the Experimental Syntax program. Exploring anecdotal reports, Snyder (2000) found that in as few as five exposures, participants found some types of wh-extraction anomaly (‘weak Islands’) significantly more acceptable at the end of the session compared to the beginning whereas others (‘strong Islands’) did not experience any rating improvement. Varied success in replicating initial results casts doubts on the proposal that rating data, experimentally elicited, can tease apart grammatical from performance sources of unacceptability. Sprouse (2009) suggests an alternative –Satiation arises as an artifact of a disproportionate number of ungrammatical to grammatical sentences in the testing session. This approach provides an explanation for the apparent mismatch in findings, but also highlights issues regarding the advances of experimental syntax: do experimental methods provide better data or do aspects of some designs systematically introduce extraneous influences themselves? Evidence from three rating and two self-paced reading tasks suggests that although robust evidence supporting the memory-based claim is not found, evidence that Satiation is strictly task-based is not substantiated either; sentences that satiate are similar across experiments. A novel observation is made that satiating sentences are also more readily interpretable than non-satiating sentences – providing some explanation for the apparent mismatch between Satiation studies, and also points to another source of variability associated with experimental approaches to linguistic intuition. In sum, evidence here underlines the composite nature of introspection, points areas of refinement for experimental techniques and advocates for the adoption of cross-methodological procedures to enhance syntactic investigation.

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.

abstract: Code-switching, a bilingual language phenomenon, which may be defined as the concurrent use of two or more languages by fluent speakers is frequently misunderstood and stigmatized. Given that the majority of the world's population is bilingual rather than monolingual, the study of code-switching provides a fundamental window into human cognition and the systematic structural outcomes of language contact. Intra-sentential code-switching is said to systematically occur, constrained by the lexicons of each respective language. In order to access information about the acceptability of certain switches, linguists often elicit grammaticality judgments from bilingual informants. In current linguistic research, grammaticality judgment tasks are often scrutinized on account of the lack of stability of responses to individual sentences. Although this claim is largely motivated by research on monolingual strings under a variety of variable conditions, the stability of code-switched grammaticality judgment data given by bilingual informants has yet to be systematically investigated. By comparing grammaticality judgment data from 3 groups of German-English bilinguals, Group A (N=50), Group B (N=34), and Group C (N=40), this thesis investigates the stability of grammaticality judgments in code-switching over time, as well as a potential difference in judgments between judgment data for spoken and written code-switching stimuli. Using a web-based survey, informants were asked to give ratings of each code-switched token. The results were computed and findings from a correlated groups t test attest to the stability of code-switched judgment data over time with a p value of .271 and to the validity of the methodologies currently in place. Furthermore, results from the study also indicated that no statistically significant difference was found between spoken and written judgment data as computed with an independent groups t test resulting in a p value of .186, contributing a valuable fact to the body of data collection practices in research in bilingualism. Results from this study indicate that there are significant differences attributable to language dominance for specific token types, which were calculated using an ANOVA test. However, when using group composite scores of all tokens, the ANOVA measure returned a non-significant score of .234, suggesting that bilinguals with differing language dominances rank in a similar manner. The findings from this study hope to help clarify current practices in code-switching research. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. German 2011

In this thesis, I investigate the link between A-movement and online processing in eye-tracking and self-paced reading (SPR). A-movement refers to movement of an element to an argument position, where an element may be base-generated and hold a semantic role of the main predicate of the clause. I analyze six constructions in English, divided into three experimental pairings. Unaccusative constructions argued to involve movement are contrasted with unergatives as control, in a purely intransitive pairing. Transitive verb expectations are controlled by contrasting optional transitive constructions and purported movement in inchoative constructions. Argument alternation is taken into consideration in comparing instrumental constructions and possible movement in middle constructions. The results from the SPR experiment did not show significant differences in reading times or fixation durations between pairings in any regions. In the eye-tracking results, no significant effects were found at the verb region, where the syntactic complexity of movement could lead to greater processing effort. In the subject noun region of the optional transitive and inchoative constructions and instrumental and middle constructions, significant differences in gaze duration, total fixation duration, and go-past time were found. These results are compatible with theories of frequency effects. Differences at the adverb could support lexical or derivational approaches, as controls and experimental conditions had equal length fixations in our first pairing, controls had longer fixations in our second pairing, and experimental items had longer fixations in our third pairing. Ultimately, the results do not offer strong support for the derivational approach, and are not accounted for through a lexical approach. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Cette thèse se centre sur les discordances dans l’ellipse périphérique (RNR) et propose une analyse basée sur l’identité de lexème entre le matériel manquant et le matériel périphérique. Les analyses précédentes accordent de l’importance au syncrétisme, ou identité phonologique (Pullum & Zwicky (1986)). Dans cette thèse, nous contestons cette hypothèse. Nous avons analysé 5 types de discordance dans l’ellipse périphérique: discordances de polarité, de possessifs, de prépositions, de voix et de formes verbales. Nos études de corpus sur Internet, sur Frtenten 2012 (1.6 milliard de mots) (Baroni et al. (2009)) et sur le English Web 2013 (19 milliard mots) montrent l’existence des discordances dans l’ellipse périphérique en français et en anglais. Les discordances sont assez nombreuses même dans des écrits soignés. Dans tous les cas, les discordances sont résolues par la forme qui correspond au second conjoint. Les résultats des expériences de jugements d’acceptabilité et de mouvements oculaires permettent d’intégrer les discordances dans la grammaire. Les résultats sont compatibles avec les analyses qui postulent l’identité sémantique entre le matériel manquant et l’antécédent pour l’ellipse. Nous proposons une analyse formelle en HPSG.Nous comparons les résultats obtenus avec les cas de coordination lexicale. Nous montrons que l’accord de proximité s’applique (Villavicencio et al. (2005)) et nous proposons une analyse HPSG pour la coordination de verbes et de prépositions. / This thesis focuses on mismatches in peripheral ellipsis (RNR) and proposes an analysis based on lexeme identity between the missing material and the peripheral material. Previous analyses put emphasis on syncretism, or phonological identity (Pullum & Zwicky (1986)). In this thesis, we challenge this hypothesis. We analyzed 5 types of mismatches in peripheral ellipsis: polarity mismatch, possessive mismatch, voice mismatch and verbal form mismatch. Our corpus studies on the Internet, on Frtenten 2012 (1.6 billion words) (Baroni et al. (2009)) and on English Web 2013 (19 billion words) shows the existence of mismatches in peripheral ellipsis in French and English. Mismatches are quite numerous even in careful writings. In all cases, the mismatches are resolved by the form that corresponds to the second conjunct. The results of acceptability judgment tests and eye tracking experiments allow the integration of these mismatches into the grammar. The results are compatible with analyses postulating semantic identity between the missing material and the antecedent for ellipsis. We formalize peripheral ellipsis with mismatch within HPSG.We finally compare our results with lexical coordination. We show that it obeys closest conjunct agreement (Villavicencio et al (2005)) and propose a HPSG analysis for coordination of verbs and prepositions.