We read a novel one sentence at a time. The first scale of attention for even the longest novel is the play of forces within the thousands of individual sentences. This project aims to rescale the analysis of novelistic form, elucidating this play of forces: how do they shape attention, and how do structures of attention give rise to aesthetic experience? We recognize the importance of form in music and architecture in part because there is no referential content to distract us. When it comes to the realist novel, however, its rich referential field easily obscures the dynamics of experience created by form. This study seeks to elucidate those dynamics. Chapter One analyzes Austen’s long interval of tension. Austen’s capacious sentence stretches attention over an entire descriptive event, producing drama and crises even when events in the fictional world are characterized by equilibrium and serenity. With the syntax of the sentence unresolved, attention cannot rest. An achieved description thus has perceptual corollaries in temporal commitment, and in attention that is divided between the immediate claims of elaboration and the prospect of closure. In Dickens, microstructures of just one to three sentences elicit the sudden apercu. Like metaphor, the apercu emerges through our recognition of a meaningful relationship between actions, facts, and utterances. Dickens presents only the raw materials of discovery (say, by juxtaposing a character’s mutually contradictory statements), leaving to us the second-order activity of recognition (her disingenuousness). Chapter Three examines how Hardy employs linguistic analogues to represent the essential structure of perceptual experience. Chapter Four, on late James, shows how shifts in attention on two scales produce two distinct experiences. Shifts to the periphery of a scene act as a temporal ballast, adding weight to the perceived dimensions of the passage. Shifts within the sentence elicit intense perceptual involvement, even when that absorption exceeds what is warranted by the semantic plane. The essence of the novel’s referenced world can be preserved in memory, but linguistic form resists memory; it is immediate and ephemeral. During the act of reading, it is one of the novel’s greatest pleasures.

To date, no real consensus has emerged among syntacticians about how to derive verb-initial order (V1); but the two main approaches, \(V^0\)-raising and VP-raising, receive particularly widespread support in the literature. The syntax of Niuean pseudo noun incorporation (PNI) has played an important role in the propagation of the VP-raising analysis (Massam 2001), especially for VSO languages and languages with a VSO option. In this thesis, I present an analysis of the prosody of Niuean PNI and show that the PNI verb and incorporated argument form a prosodic constituent. While this result is consistent with the syntactic analysis of Massam (2001), it is also consistent with a prosodic restructuring analysis that explains the VOS order of PNI by appealing to prosodic well-formedness. I take the second approach. Specifically, the principle behind Selkirk's (1984) Sense Unit Condition requires that the verb and its internal argument(s) form a unique phonological phrase. In order to satisfy this requirement, the incorporated argument moves into a position adjacent to the verb at PF. Positionally motivated categorical feature sharing (Adger and Svenonius 2011; Pesetsky and Torrego 2007) allows PF to reference the head-argument relationship between the verb and its internal argument, even though they are not sent to PF in structurally adjacent positions. The main result for the syntactic analysis of Niuean is that \(V^0\)-raising replaces VP-raising. The benefits of the \(V^0\)-raising approach include i) less phonologically vacuous structure in places where Niuean has overt morphology, e.g., a perpetually null \(T^0\) in the face of overt tense markers; and ii) observance of the idea that thematic roles are correlated to structural positions. Thus, the prosodic analysis of Niuean PNI has a number of positive outcomes for Niuean syntax, as well as the potential to simplify the derivation of VSO cross-linguistically. / Linguistics

Referential null objects are attested in several varieties of Spanish that are in contact with other languages. Some of them coexist with languages with rich agreement system, e.g., Spanish in contact with Quechua and Basque (cf., e.g., Landa 1995; Franco 1993; Sánchez 1998). The availability of such null objects is thought to be due to some type of transfer from the contact language. As such, bilingualism and language dominance are relevant in determining whether or not a speaker drops objects. One objective of this work is to examine the Spanish language forms of Basque-Spanish speakers of disparate levels of Spanish and Basque abilities, with the aim of determining the role of dominance in the occurrence of null objects. Results obtained from naturalistic data contradict previous claims on dominance. Statistical analysis concludes that dominance is not a factor that determines the occurrence of null objects. Furthermore, closer analysis of the data suggests that these findings challenge previous hypotheses regarding the semantic nature that licenses null objects. Data conflicts with claims on animacy being the feature that allows object drop demonstrating that the picture is less clear than suggested in earlier proposals. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

It has long been argued that prosodic cues may facilitate syntax acquisition (e.g., Morgan, 1986). Previous studies have shown that infants are sensitive to violations of typical correlations between clause-final prosodic cues (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987) and that prosody facilitates memory for strings of words (Soderstrom et al., 2005). This dissertation broaches the question of whether children can use this information in syntax acquisition by asking if learners can use the prosodic correlates of clauses to locate syntactic constituents. One property of certain syntactic constituents in natural languages is that they can move, so learning of constituency was inferred if participants treated prosodically-grouped words as cohesive, moveable chunks. In Experiment 1, 19-month-olds were familiarized with sentences from an artificial grammar with either 1-clause or 2-clause prosody. The infants from the 2-clause group later recognized the prosodically-marked clauses when they had moved to a new position in the sentence and had a new acoustic contour. Adults in Experiment 2 showed similar learning, although their judgments also rely on recognition of perceptually-salient words at prosodic boundaries. Subsequent experiments explored the mechanisms underlying this prosodic bootstrapping by testing Japanese-acquiring infants on English-based stimuli (Experiment 3) and English-acquiring infants on Japanese-based stimuli (Experiment 4). Infants were able to locate constituent-like groups of words with both native and non-native prosody, suggesting that the acoustic correlates of prosody are sufficiently robust across languages that they can be used in early syntax acquisition without extensive exposure to language-specific prosodic features. On the other hand, adults (Experiment 5) are less flexible, and are only able to use prosody consistent with their native language, suggesting an age- or experience-related tuning of the prosodic perceptual mechanism. This dissertation supports prosody as an important cue that allows infants and young children to break into syntax even before they understand many words, and helps explain the rapid rate of syntax acquisition.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation is an analysis, assuming the framework of Government and Binding Theory, of the syntactic derivation of comparative correlative constructions (hereafter CCs for short) in Mandarin Chinese. It attempts to evaluate the theoretical adequacy of extant treatments of CCs and propose an alternative analysis to the prevailing adjunct approach. CC constructions exist crosslinguistically. An English example is The more chocolate I eat, the happier I feel. In Chinese, a simplex CC sentence consists of two non-coordinated clauses; the lexical word yue, which indicates degree, is obligatory in both clauses, as illustrated in (1): (1) tianqi yue₁ re, dian-fei yue₂ gao. weather [ YUE₁ hot], electricity-fee [YUE₂ high] `The hotter the weather is, the higher the electricity fee is.' Unlike the English comparative phrase, which has been shown to undergo A-bar movement in earlier studies, the yue-constituent remains in situ. I argue that yue is generated in [Spec, DegP] and behaves as an indefinite in-situ degree element on a par with an in-situ wh-element (Li 1992; Tsai 1994; Cheng and Rooryck 2000; Cheng 2003a, 2003b). The yue-variable in each clause is unselectively bound (Lewis 1975, Heim 1982, Cheng and Huang 1996) by an implicit CORRELATIVITY OPERATOR and does not undergo A-bar movement. In addition to the idiosyncratic in-situ yue-phrase, another property of CCs is the syntactic interdependency between the constitutive clauses. Earlier studies (Dikken 2005, Taylor 2006, 2009, Tsao and Hsiao 2002) treat the preceding clause as an adjunct. However, an adjunct approach cannot account for the property of syntactic interdependency. As an alternative, I assume Rizzi's (1997) work on the Split CP Hypothesis, arguing that Chinese CCs implicate the information structure in the left periphery and that they are a type of Focus construction. A Chinese CC sentence like (1) is projected by a null functional head Foc⁰. The first clause is focused and base-generated in [Spec, FocP] and the second clause is the complement of the null Foc⁰. The [+focus]feature in Foc⁰ licenses the co-occurrence of yue₁ and yue₂. This alternative analysis can capture not only crosslinguistic commonalities but also the language-internal property of topic-prominence in Chinese.