Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "Linguistics"
Now showing items 1-20 of 37
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A Deluge of Tears: The Conflux of Persian Shiʿi Literature, Ritual, and Identity in Martyrdom Narratives
(2021-05-13)This dissertation presents the first English in-depth study of one of the most important maqtals (martyrdom narratives) ever written in Persian, the Rowz̤at ol-Shohadā’ (Meadow of the Martyrs) by Ḥoseyn b. ʿAlī Beyhaqī ... -
A Morphological Typology of Non-Root Alternations: Invasion, Suppletion, and Allomorphy
(2023-08-29)This dissertation investigates analogy, with the goal being to establish an empirical and theoretical basis for determining which factors influence analogical changes. It centers on an understudied set of phenomena known ... -
Any Questions? Polarity as a Window into the Structure of Questions
(2013-09-30)This dissertation investigates the peculiar behavior of negative polarity items in questions and argues that a unified account of their distribution across declarative and interrogative constructions is feasible. These ... -
Attachment Patterns Trigger Differential Neural Signature of Emotional Processing in Adolescents
(Public Library of Science, 2013)Background: Research suggests that individuals with different attachment patterns process social information differently, especially in terms of facial emotion recognition. However, few studies have explored social information ... -
Causal Mediation Analysis Reveals Syntactic Agreement Mechanisms in Neural Language Models
(2021-06-23)Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. Although this is well established, the mechanisms by which neural language models ... -
Clausal Deficiency
(2024-01-25)This thesis investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of clauses which are considered to be deficient in some manner, which are often called infinitival or nonfinite clauses. This thesis is concerned with three ... -
Compositional routes to (non)intersectivity
(2022-05-13)This dissertation is concerned with a particular instance of ambiguity in natural language, between intersective and nonintersective interpretations of certain adjectives. Adjectives like good display a consistent alternation ... -
Dental-aspirate presents in Greek and Indo-European
(2023-01-18)This work examines the class of Greek presents in -θε/ο- and, by comparison with cognate formations in the other Indo-European daughter languages, attempts to recover the form and function of the dental aspirate suffix in ... -
Developing a competency-based training tool to introduce word reading drills to novice learners
(2021-04-08)There are two major goals in this study: (1) propose a novel use of technology for learning Japanese katakana that enables the use of early word reading drills for beginners to help them learn new characters through finishing ... -
Evidence from behavioral experiments: Information theory and discourse-based accounts of long-distance dependencies
(2022-03-29)For decades, linguists and psychologists have sought to understand why some long-distance dependencies sound grammatical while others less so, and how people process them. In this dissertation, I investigate these puzzles ... -
Executive Function, Visual Attention and the Cocktail Party Problem in Musicians and Non-Musicians
(Public Library of Science, 2016)The goal of this study was to investigate how cognitive factors influence performance in a multi-talker, “cocktail-party” like environment in musicians and non-musicians. This was achieved by relating performance in a ... -
Feature Mismatch: Deponency in Indo-European Languages
(2014-06-06)This thesis investigates "voice mismatch verbs" (deponents), verbs that take non-active morphology but are used in syntactically active environments. The focus is on the non-informant Indo-European languages Hittite, Vedic ... -
Generating Semantic Graphs for Natural Language
(2023-05-23)Natural language understanding is a critical capability in achieving advanced artificial intelligent language processing systems such as reading comprehension, question answering, and interactive dialogues. Despite the ... -
Grape Expectations: A collection of EEG stories on form-based prediction in natural language contexts
(2023-05-12)It is no longer controversial to say that language comprehension involves prediction. Decades of psycholinguistic research have demonstrated that comprehenders reliably anticipate both the meaning and the form of upcoming ... -
Heritage Welsh: a study of heritage language as the outcome of minority language acquisition and bilingualism
(2014-06-06)This dissertation analyzes the language used by 20 adult heritage Welsh speakers now living in London, i.e., bilinguals who shifted to English dominance in childhood, and whose Welsh proficiencies now show divergences from ... -
Inferring Speaker Affect in Spoken Natural Language Communication
(2013-03-15)The field of spoken language processing is concerned with creating computer programs that can understand human speech and produce human-like speech. Regarding the problem of understanding human speech, there is currently ... -
Informative Presupposition & Accommodation
(2022-05-11)Presuppositions are the parts of meanings of utterances which are backgrounded and strongly committed to by the speaker. They are carried by a diverse range of lexical items called presupposition triggers, which include ... -
Interpreting Language with Continuation-Based Semantics
(2023-06-30)Starting with Montague’s lambda calculus for explaining natural language, programming language and natural language have had many commonalities that allowed theories in one to explicate phenomena in the other. In this ... -
Lost in space: Pronoun choice in English locative prepositional phrases
(2022-09-06)This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., herself) and personal pronouns (e.g., her) in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for ... -
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 ...