Although there are many studies about the relationship between grammar and lexicon, there is a lack of studies examining the relationship between the growth of compound words and complex sentences. This study examined the relationship between compound words at the lexical level, and complex sentences, auxiliaries and modals, and coordinated subjects/objects at the grammatical level, for both brain-injured and typically developing children between the ages 4 and 6. For 10 typically developing children, 3091 utterances, and for 18 brain-injured children, 6460 utterances were examined. The results revealed that both groups showed a significant increase in the use of compound words and coordinated clauses. The growth of auxiliary and modal verbs is significant only for typically developing children and the growth of subordinate clauses is significant just for brain injured children. Moreover, there is an interaction between the growth of coordinate clauses and compound words just for brain injured children.

This dissertation investigates interactions between gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology in a sample of 100 African languages, and provides a method for assessing the role that these interactions play in the grammatical complexity of gender systems. The dissertation is organised around three research foci. First, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and number along the following dimensions: exponence, syncretism, indexation, correlations in type of marking, and gender assignment. The study provides evidence for the possibility that nominal features are organised in a relevance hierarchy. In addition, the study shows that animacy and lexical plurality play a crucial role in the distribution of special patterns of plural indexation. The study also shows that pervasive indexation systems in the language sample always involve both gender and number. Finally, the study shows how gender assignment can be used as a means for encoding variation in the countability properties of nouns and noun phrases. Second, the dissertation surveys patterns of interaction between gender and evaluative morphology in the languages of the sample. Two types of interactions are found. The study shows that the distribution of the two types depends on three factors: the type of gender system, the number of gender distinctions and the possibility of assigning a noun to more than one gender. Third, the dissertation investigates the role that interactions of gender and number and gender and evaluative morphology play in the absolute complexity of gender. The study proposes a metric for gender complexity and uses this metric to compute complexity scores for the languages of the sample. The results suggest that the gender systems of the language sample lean toward high complexity, that genealogically related languages have the same or similar complexity scores, and that the distribution of the outliers can often be understood as the result of language contact.

Although there are many studies about the relationship between grammar and lexicon, there is a lack of studies examining the relationship between the growth of compound words and complex sentences. This study examined the relationship between compound words at the lexical level, and complex sentences, auxiliaries and modals, and coordinated subjects/objects at the grammatical level, for both brain-injured and typically developing children between the ages 4 and 6. For 10 typically developing children, 3091 utterances, and for 18 brain-injured children, 6460 utterances were examined. The results revealed that both groups showed a significant increase in the use of compound words and coordinated clauses. The growth of auxiliary and modal verbs is significant only for typically developing children and the growth of subordinate clauses is significant just for brain injured children. Moreover, there is an interaction between the growth of coordinate clauses and compound words just for brain injured children.

Research has shown that children with language impairment (LI) exhibit difficulties with both social communication and syntax. This study analyzed the effect of a social communication intervention on syntactic development, focusing on grammatical complexity in three children with LI when enacting stories. The intervention included reading and enacting stories, playing games with picture emotion cards and journaling. Each child's mean length of terminal unit (t-unit), the number and type of subordinate clauses they produced per t-unit, and the grammaticality of their complex sentences was analyzed. While none of the children increased their mean length of t-unit or the grammaticality of their sentences, one participant showed a slight increase in the number of subordinate clauses she used and another participant changed the basic format with which she enacted stories to a more mature format. The results of this study did not support the claim that a single intervention could target both social communicative and syntactic goals simultaneously. There were limitations to this study that, if addressed, could potentially support this claim.

Research has shown that children with Language Impairment (LI) struggle with social communication skills in addition to their characteristic syntactic difficulties. This pilot study analyzed the potential change in grammatical complexity in narratives of five children with LI when enrolled in a social communication intervention. The intervention itself focused on teaching emotion understanding by reading and reenacting children’s stories and journaling. Grammatical limitations were indirectly addressed by clinician modeling of complex forms during the intervention sessions. Each child’s productions were assessed and analyzed for grammatical complexity during retelling a book in the Mercer Mayer “a boy, a dog, and a frog” series. The children performed this task once a week during the course of the intervention. Specific measures used included the average length of terminable unit (T-unit) and the number of subordinate clauses used in each narrative. Three students’ productions remained steady throughout the course of the interventions; their grammatical complexity neither increased nor decreased. One student’s production showed a clear decrease in complexity but was explained by an obvious and arguably more creative change in her language output. One student’s grammatical complexity increased throughout the sessions as indicated by a steady increase in the average length of T-unit. Thus, the results of this study were equivocal. There were several limitations, however, that might be addressed in future intervention studies.

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This diploma thesis maps the diachronic tendencies in the frequency and functions of it-cleft sentences in two sub-registers of academic prose, humanities and natural sciences, from 1800 to 2019. Biber and Gray (2016) showed changes in grammatical complexity in academic writing, namely the shift between phrasal and clausal grammatical complexity and explicitness, which motivated the hypothesis of this thesis, i.e. that the frequency of it-clefts is expected to decrease in the course of 20th century in both sub-registers with the development being faster and more salient in natural sciences. General description presents the syntactic and semantic properties of it-clefts together with discussion about FSP and the distinction between new and given information, as the objective of the thesis is also to study the development of the functional types of clefts. The empirical part analyses a corpus of 170 academic texts, covering the time period under study. It is divided into sections based on time periods displaying similar features concerning the frequency of it-clefts in natural sciences and humanities. The analysis confirms that the expected decrease in the frequency of it-clefts is clearly notable in the case of natural sciences, while in humanities the frequency of it-clefts in individual texts...

The present study replicated the research framework of a previous study (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011) that identifies the grammatical complexity of L1 professional academic prose as strongly favoring a dense use of phrasal nominal modifiers such as prepositional phrases as postmodifiers, attributive adjectives, and nouns as premodifiers which characterize its unique structurally compressed discourse style. The main purpose of the present study was to explore syntactic similarities and differences between L1 professional and L2 student academic writing in terms of their reliance on phrasal/nominal compression features to determine characteristics of the grammatical complexity of advanced ESL academic writing. To this end, the distributional patterns of use for 25 specific grammatical complexity features of structural elaboration and compression were investigated in a corpus of 128 short academic essays collected from 16 advanced ESL learners and 16 L1 university students (as comparison data).The results showed a heavier reliance of both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing on phrasal nominal modifiers (attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases as postmodifiers) of structural compression than on clausal elaboration features, which lent empirical support to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) findings. In addition to the phrasal compression features, both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing were also characterized by a prominent use of specific colloquial grammatical devices such as adverbs as adverbials. Compared to the advanced ESL writing, the L1 student academic writing showed a significantly more preference for one particular colloquial feature: ZERO relative clauses where relative pronouns replacing relativized objects are omitted. This combined reliance on both phrasal compression devices and colloquial features in both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing distinguished their grammatical complexities from that of L1 professional academic prose and signaled a possibility for recognizing them as a transitional developmental stage from more casual to more academic writing.