Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "Linguistics"
Now showing items 21-39 of 39
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A Modular Theory of Radical Pro Drop
(2014-06-06)Mandarin Chinese is said to be a radical pro-drop language, in the sense that verbal arguments in this language can be dropped rather freely. However, in this dissertation, I show that the omission of arguments in Mandarin ... -
Nasal presents from Homer to Attic Greek: Analogy and reanalysis in the Greek verb
(2021-11-16)This thesis investigates the history and development of the ancient Greek "nasal presents": verbs which characterize their imperfective stems with one of a variety of morphemes which include a nasal consonant. The focus ... -
A New Take on John Maynard Smith's Concept of Protein Space for Understanding Molecular Evolution
(Public Library of Science, 2016)Much of the public lacks a proper understanding of Darwinian evolution, a problem that can be addressed with new learning and teaching approaches to be implemented both inside the classroom and in less formal settings. Few ... -
Noise-skipping Earley parsing and in-order tree extraction from shared packed parse forests
(2021-04-08)In this thesis, I identify 3 shortcomings of state of the art Earley parsing and offer a unified, end-to-end Earley parsing algorithm which remedies these shortcomings. In particular I address the following issues: 1. The ... -
On the linguistic encoding of the notion of inference
(2022-09-15)In our everyday life we often talk about events that we have not witnessed but just inferred based on some evidence available to us. This dissertation investigates two types of linguistic expressions that people use when ... -
Pluractionality in progress
(2021-05-13)The goal of this dissertation is to describe and analyze the interaction of pluractionality, a kind of event plurality, and the progressive aspect. Based on original fieldwork, I present novel data showing that, in ... -
Polar questions and interrogative particles: a crosslinguistic investigation
(2021-03-05)The strategy used for forming polar questions varies across languages. In languages like Finnish and Turkish, polar questions are formed using interrogative particles, which I call polar interrogative particles. The main ... -
Prosodic Noun Incorporation and Verb-Initial Syntax
(2014-10-21)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. ... -
A Record of a Tibetan Medieval Debate: History, Language, and Efficacy of Tibetan Buddhist Debate
(2014-06-06)This dissertation is intended to serve as a thorough examination of a particular debate between Lho pa Thugs rje dpal and Rong ston Shakya rgyal mtshan (1367-1449). According to the colophon of this medieval Tibetan debate ... -
Rich Linguistic Structure from Large-Scale Web Data
(2013-10-18)The past two decades have shown an unexpected effectiveness of Web-scale data in natural language processing. Even the simplest models, when paired with unprecedented amounts of unstructured and unlabeled Web data, have ... -
The Semantics of Measurement
(2014-10-21)This thesis examines linguistic phenomena that implicate measurement in the nominal domain. The first is morphological number, as in one book vs. two books. Intuitively, the contrast between singular and plural forms of ... -
The Sense of Self: Topics in the Semantics of De Se Expressions
(2013-03-08)This work investigates a series of phenomena that shed light on the analysis of attitudes de se. We adopt Lewis’ (1979) proposal that attitudes de se involve self-ascription of a property, and investigate how this view of ... -
Shapeshifting Tongues: Linguistic Consciousness in the Hellenistic World
(2024-05-13)In order to demonstrate the applicability of sociolinguistic methods for studying the ancient world, my dissertation, “Shapeshifting Tongues: Linguistic Consciousness in the Hellenistic World,” investigates the role of ... -
Studies in Tocharian Adjective Formation
(2013-10-08)This thesis is devoted to the investigation of two morphological classes in Tocharian and their Indo-European prehistory and affiliation: 1) the continuants of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) thematic ("class I") adjectives, and ... -
The Code of Phantasia. Philosophical Investigations into the Literary Imagination and Its Future Forms
(2022-11-23)In this dissertation, I hypothesize that before long we will have to find a (neuro)technological medium that can replace the book (and the eBook) if we do not wish for the literary imagination to entirely disappear under ... -
The Middle Category in the Aorist Tense in the Homeric Epics: A Study of Form vs. Function
(2023-06-01)This thesis investigates the middle category in Ancient Greek in general and its representation and usage in the aorist tense in the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in particular. The thesis has two major goals: ... -
Time in Mandarin: The Fingerprints of Tense and Finiteness
(2020-10-05)This dissertation offers a systematic investigation of the temporal interpretations of root clauses and complement clauses in Mandarin involving functional projections of tense, aspect and modality, with a focus on the ... -
Voice and Valency in Amarasi: Topics in Synchronic and Diachronic Morphosyntax
(2023-07-31)This dissertation is a detailed investigation into the morphosyntax of Amarasi (ISO: aaz), an Austronesian language of West Timor, Indonesia. It focuses on the various subsystems of voice, valency, and agreement within the ... -
Wide meanings across narrow contexts: Sakha particles and the grammar of alternatives
(2024-03-12)A central empirical observation that this thesis considers is OBSERVABLE HOMOPHONY IN QUANTIFICATIONAL MORPHOLOGY — namely, in many languages there are morphemes which, depending on context, can perform two or more of the ...