Univ., Diss.--Ohio.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-43).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis supervisors: J.B. Tomblin, Amanda J. Owen. Includes bibliographic references (p. 139-146).

Habilitationsschrift--Ruhr-Universität Bochum. / Includes indexes. Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-370).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, 1985. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 566-578).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Linguistics, August 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 14, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Students learning a foreign language are apt to apply their own linguistic habits to the new language. Actually many problems of foreign language learning arise out of the interference of the learner’s first language habits. Thus modern linguists believe that a given foreign language cannot be successfully taught in an identical way to a group of students with different linguistic backgrounds. While it is true that problems of the learning of a foreign language are various, and that each of them must be attacked with a different technique, the technique of Contrastive Analysis can be universally applied in foreign language teaching. Contrastive analysis of the source language and the target language has been proved fruitful by Professor Robert Lado formerly of the University of Michigan, especially in devising tests and preparing teaching materials. This thesis, which is based upon Professor Lado’s method, is a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese basic syntactical structures, and an attempt to establish a hierachy of difficulty so as to help teachers who teach English as a second language to Chinese students. The work is confined to the syntactical level. Other levels of the formal structure of language such as the phonological level, the morphophonemic level, and the semantic level, are beyond the scope of the purpose of the paper. The analysis is presented in the transformational approach demonstrated by Noam Chomsky in "A Transformational Approach to Syntax". (See Introduction) The thesis is divided into five sections. In each section, except Section 1, descriptions and contrastive analyses of the two languages are made so that conclusions can be reached and problems of Chinese speakers learning English can be predicted. Section 1 is an introduction which explains the use of contrastive analysis, and justifies the adoption of the transformational approach. Section 2 is an illustration, by generating sentences, of the English and Chinese Phrase Structure rules. Section 3 describes the Noun Phrases in both languages. Section 4 is a discussion of the personal pronoun, while Section 5 contains a classification of English and Chinese verbs. It is hoped that this paper will be of some value for teachers who are teaching English to Chinese speakers, and also that it will provide other teachers with some insight into the values of contrastive analysis in foreign language teaching. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

This dissertation has three main goals: 1. To provide an analysis of the syntax and semantics of Salish determiners and quantifiers. 2. To provide an account of differences in the determiner and quantification systems of Salish and English which reduces cross-linguistic variation to a minimum, in line with a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar. 3. To assess the theoretical consequences of the analysis of Salish, including implications for the range of possible cross-linguistic variation in determiner and quantification systems, and the nature of the relationship between syntactic structure and interpretation. I give evidence that one common method of expressing quantificational notions in English is absent in Salish. While English readily allows quantifiers to occupy the syntactic position of the determiner (as in every woman, most women), Salish languages do not allow such constructions (see also Jelinek 1995). I propose that Salish and English exemplify opposite settings of a Common Ground Parameter, which states that Salish determiners may not access the common ground of the discourse. This parameter accounts not only for the absence of quantificational determiners in Salish (since quantifiers presuppose existence, and therefore access the common ground), it also derives several other differences between Salish and English determiners, such as the absence of a definiteness distinction in Salish. I further demonstrate that Salish possesses a robust system of DP-internal quantification, and that quantificational DPs in Salish function as generalized quantifiers at logical form. This means that the strong hypothesis that languages do not differ with respect to the presence or absence of generalized quantifiers is upheld (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981). Simple DPs in Salish, unlike in English, do not function as generalized quantifiers. This result follows from the Common Ground Parameter. I give further evidence from St'at'imcets (Lillooet Salish) on the strong/weak quantifier distinction; I argue that the interpretation of weak quantifiers is derivable directly from the overt syntactic position of the quantifier. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate