Although the syntax of the left periphery of the Irish clausal architecture has been the subject of considerable research within the generative paradigm, many questions remain unresolved. The general goal of this thesis is to explore some of these understudied territories. Specifically, I consider two distinct, but ultimately related phenomena: headless relative clauses and dependent verbal morphology. I will make four major claims: The first two concern the syntax (and semantics) of the headless relative clause. First, despite the fact that the particles that appear in resumptive relative clauses and in headless relative clauses are morpho-phonologically identical as aN, headless relative clauses are derived by movement, not by means of resumption, and thus the particles in these two constructions are not the same. Second, headless relative clauses are amount relative clauses, in the sense of Carlson (1977); and thus I claim, adopting Grosu and Landman's (1998) notion of complex degree, that the element that undergoes A$'$-movement in a headless relative clause is a complex degree, causing degree-abstraction in the semantics. The maximalization operator then applies to the degree-abstracted relative CP. I argue that it is this operator that triggers the appearance of the particle aN in the headless relative construction. The latter two claims concern the morphosyntax of the left periphery of Irish syntax: First, I claim that there are two tense features in a single finite clause domain of Irish, and that the so-called dependent forms of irregular verbs are the surface realization of the two tense features. This account provides a stepping stone to my final claim that a feature agreeing with the maximalization operator, but not the operator itself, is realized in the headless relative particle aN and that the particles found in resumptive relative clauses and in headless relative clauses are in fact distinct Vocabulary Items and thus they are homophonous. This thesis thus fills a gap in the descriptive account of Irish syntax, and provides new insights to the theory of relativization.

This thesis revisits the variation inherent to the French wh interrogative system. In La[urentien]F[rench], there are many ways to ask wh questions, all of which are said to have the same general interpretation. By looking at different types of data, historical as well as contemporary, this thesis puts forward three main findings/proposals: i. the high degree of variation is due to the use of wh est-ce que, which appeared in Old French as an interrogative cleft (Rouquier 2003); ii. between Old and Modern French, wh est-ce que has gone through a typical cycle of grammaticalisation (as described by Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2008a, b), while the free relative of the Old French cleft remained unchanged; iii. today’s LaF wh system is dominated by the wh est-ce que and variants (over 98 percent of use – Elsig 2009), which lack traditional wh movement. It is proposed that wh est-ce que and variants appear in a construction containing an atrophied clefted CP adjoined to a main clause containing a wh operator, whereas the variant traditionally called wh in situ is generated in a structure in which the wh element is interpreted and spelled-out in the position of Merge. In addition to its theoretical contribution, this thesis helps to bring together theoretical and applied linguistics, since it makes use of different types of data, both historical and synchronic (oral and written corpora, experimental studies and grammaticality judgements). Moreover, the conclusions raise important questions about the realities of diglossia in the French diaspora: wh interrogative variants are divided according to fundamental structural differences; some have wh movement (high, formal register) and others do not (vernacular and neutral register). Finally, this thesis also contributes to the theories of oralité (Gadet 1992), since it sheds light on a complex system of variants found exclusively in vernacular speech.

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No description available.

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1977. / Bibliography: leaves 240-243. / Microfiche. / xiii, 243 leaves ill

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-188) / Microfiche. / xii, 188 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-127). / xiii, 127 leaves, bound 29 cm

This thesis proposes that there are two kinds of clauses: indexical clauses, which are evaluated with respect to the speech situation; and anaphoric clauses, which are evaluated with respect to a contextually-given (anaphoric) situation. Empirical motivation for this claim comes from the clause-typing system of Plains Cree, an Algonquian language spoken on the Canadian plains, which morpho-syntactically distinguishes between two types of clauses traditionally called INDEPENDENT and CONJUNCT orders. In the current analysis, the INDEPENDENT order instantiates indexical clauses, and the CONJUNCT order instantiates anaphoric clauses. After laying out the proposal (chapter 1) and establishing the morphosyntax of Plains Cree CPs (chapter 2), the remaining chapters discuss the proposal in detail. Chapter 3 focusses on the syntax and semantics of indexical clauses (Plains Cree’s INDEPENDENT order). Syntactically, I show that there is an anti-c-command and an anti-precedence condition on indexical clauses. Semantically, I show that indexical clauses are always and only evaluated with respect to the speech situation, including the speech time (temporal anchoring), speech place (spatial anchoring), and speaker (referential anchoring). Chapter 4 focusses on the syntax and semantics of anaphoric clauses (Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT order). Syntactically, I show that anaphoric clauses must always be either preceded or dominated by some other antecedent clause. Semantically, I show that the value of temporal/spatial/referential dependent elements within an anaphoric clause is determined by an antecedent. Chapter 5 turns to the syntactic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there are three classes: chained clauses, adjunct clauses, and mediated argument clauses. I provide two kinds of diagnostics that distinguish these classes, and explore the consequences of this classification for argument clauses and complementation. Finally, Chapter 6 proposes a semantic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there is a direct mapping between the morphology and the semantics: one complementizer encodes presupposition of the proposition, the lack of a complementizer encodes a-veridicality of the proposition, and one complementizer is semantically unspecified (the elsewhere case). This means that Plains Cree’s clause-typing is fundamentally concerned with how the truth of the proposition is represented.

In natural languages, words can occur in single units called simplex words or in a group of simplex words that function as a single unit, called multiword expressions (MWEs). Although MWEs are similar to simplex words in their syntax and semantics, they pose their own sets of challenges (Sag et al. 2002). MWEs are arguably one of the biggest roadblocks in computational linguistics due to the bewildering range of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and statistical idiomaticity they are associated with, and their high productivity. In addition, the large numbers in which they occur demand specialized handling. Moreover, dealing with MWEs has a broad range of applications, from syntactic disambiguation to semantic analysis in natural language processing (NLP) (Wacholder and Song 2003; Piao et al. 2003; Baldwin et al. 2004; Venkatapathy and Joshi 2006). / Our goals in this research are: to use computational techniques to shed light on the underlying linguistic processes giving rise to MWEs across constructions and languages; to generalize existing techniques by abstracting away from individual MWE types; and finally to exemplify the utility of MWE interpretation within general NLP tasks. / In this thesis, we target English MWEs due to resource availability. In particular, we focus on noun compounds (NCs) and verb-particle constructions (VPCs) due to their high productivity and frequency. / Challenges in processing noun compounds are: (1) interpreting the semantic relation (SR) that represents the underlying connection between the head noun and modifier(s); (2) resolving syntactic ambiguity in NCs comprising three or more terms; and (3) analyzing the impact of word sense on noun compound interpretation. Our basic approach to interpreting NCs relies on the semantic similarity of the NC components using firstly a nearest-neighbor method (Chapter 5), then verb semantics based on the observation that it is often an underlying verb that relates the nouns in NCs (Chapter 6), and finally semantic variation within NC sense collocations, in combination with bootstrapping (Chapter 7). / Challenges in dealing with verb-particle constructions are: (1) identifying VPCs in raw text data (Chapter 8); and (2) modeling the semantic compositionality of VPCs (Chapter 5). We place particular focus on identifying VPCs in context, and measuring the compositionality of unseen VPCs in order to predict their meaning. Our primary approach to the identification task is to adapt localized context information derived from linguistic features of VPCs to distinguish between VPCs and simple verb-PP combinations. To measure the compositionality of VPCs, we use semantic similarity among VPCs by testing the semantic contribution of each component. / Finally, we conclude the thesis with a chapter-by-chapter summary and outline of the findings of our work, suggestions of potential NLP applications, and a presentation of further research directions (Chapter 9).

Diss. Uppsala : Uppsala Universitet, 2006.