Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 207-209. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: p. 331-335. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1978. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Bibliography: leaves 211-217. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-133). / This thesis investigates relative clauses (henceforth RCs) in Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Taiwan from both syntactic and processing perspectives. I also explore the interaction between these two areas, for example, how evidence from one area lends support to or undermines theories in the other area. There are several goals I hope to achieve: First of all, there is a significant gap in the sentence processing literature on Mandarin Chinese and in particular on RCs in Mandarin Chinese. I aim to bridge this gap by conducting experiments that will provide basic understanding of how Chinese RCs are processed. In doing so, I also provide a more complete picture of processing RCs across languages. In this thesis, I report three online reading experiments on Chinese RCs. I show that even though Chinese is also an SVO language like English and French, the results with regard to processing subject-extracted versus object-extracted RCs in Mandarin Chinese are very different from results for the same construction in other SVO languages. Thus, even though subject-extracted RCs are less complex in other SVO languages, they are more complex in Mandarin Chinese. These findings help tease apart various processing theories, in particular, I show that even though resource-based theories, canonical/non-canonical word order (frequency) theories, theory based on accessibility of syntactic positions and perspective shift theory all account for the facts reported in other SVO languages, results from Chinese are only compatible with resource-based theories and canonical/non-canonical (frequency) theories. / (cont.) Secondly, it has been noted that in many cases, resource-based theories and canonical/non-canonical word order (frequency) theories are both compatible with data from sentence processing studies. Resource-based theories attribute processing difficulty associated with subject-extracted RCs to higher storage cost in processing subject-extracted RCs whereas frequency-based canonical word order theory such as the one proposed in Mitchell et al. 1995 attributes this to the less frequent occurrences of subject-extracted RCs in corpora. As a result, it is very difficult to tease these two theories apart. However, I conducted a Chinese corpus study in this thesis and I show that there is no correlation between structural frequencies in corpora and behavioral measures such as reading times, as predicted by frequency theories. As a matter of fact, subject-extracted RCs occur more frequently in the Chinese corpus. This undermines the validity of frequency theories in explaining the processing data reported in this thesis. Thirdly, Aoun and Li to appear argue that there is syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of positing two distinct syntactic derivations for RCs with or without resumptive pronouns. RCs containing gaps involve head-raising of the head NP (i.e. no operator movement) as reconstruction of the head NP back to the RC is available. On the other hand, RCs containing resumptive pronouns involve an empty operator in [Spec, CP] and no head-raising of the head NP (since reconstruction is unavailable) ... / by Franny Pai-Fang Hsiao. / Ph.D.

Thesis. 1979. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 424-432. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 500-510. / by Kenneth Safir. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 488-496. / by Timothy Angus Stowell. / Ph.D.

Typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

L’objectif de ce travail est de présenter les résultats d’un projet de documentation linguistique sur la langue siwi (langue berbère parlée dans l’oasis de Siwa, en Egypte, par environ 25.000 locuteurs) à travers l’analyse de certains aspects de syntaxe et de sémantique intéressants pour la typologie et les études berbères, issus de l’exploitation d’un corpus de données orales, enregistré auprès de locuteurs hommes et femmes. La thèse est divisée en dix chapitres (1. L’aspect et la modalité dans le système verbal du siwi ; 2. La grammaticalisation verbale ; 3. La négation ; 4. Le suffixe -a et l’accompli résultatif ; 5. La préposition n ; 6. Les démonstratifs ; 7. La proposition relative ; 8. Les propositions subordonnées ; 9. L’accent nominal ; 10. L’ordre des mots et la structure informationnelle). Dans chaque chapitre, on commence par introduire la thématique au niveau typologique, puis dans la branche berbère, pour ensuite l’aborder en détail en siwi. Plusieurs phénomènes encore non décrits ou analysés sont traités dans ce travail de recherche. Les annexes à la fin de la thèse sont composées par des textes issus du corpus (enregistrés, transcrits et traduits pendant les missions de terrain) et leurs métadonnées. Ils donnent un échantillon plutôt varié (deux contes et trois narrations de locuteurs, hommes et femmes, d’âges différents) de la langue en question. / This work aims to present the results of a documentation project on the Siwi language (a Berber language spoken in the Siwa oasis, Egypt by 25,000 speakers) through the analysis of selected aspects of the language, concerning mainly syntax and semantics, that come from the exploitation of a corpus composed of oral data, recorded by both male and female speakers. The thesis is divided into ten chapters (1. Aspect and Mood in the Verbal System of Siwi; 2. Verbal Grammaticalisation; 3. Negation; 4. The -a Suffix and the Resultative Perfect; 5. Preposition n; 6. Demonstratives; 7. Relative Clauses; 8. Other Subordinated Clauses; 9. Accent on Nouns; 10. Word Order and the Information Structure). In each chapter, the linguistic issue is introduced in a typological perspective, then within Berber, before it is analyzed in details in Siwi. Several phenomena that had hitherto remained undescribed, or had not been analyzed, are studied in this research thesis. The appendices at the end are composed of five texts (transcribed and translated during fieldwork) and their metadata. They provide a varied sample (two folktales and three narrations by male and female speakers of different ages) of the language under examination.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES. / Bibliography: leaves 242-250. / by Robert Joseph Peter Ingria. / Ph.D.