Linguistics Dissertations and Theses: Recent submissions
Now showing items 21-40 of 95
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THE ROLE OF NON-LINGUISTIC COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC MORPHOLOGICAL PROPERTIES IN THE FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION OF DEMONSTRATIVES
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31)This dissertation investigates children’s comprehension of demonstratives, such as this and that in English. As deictic spatial expressions, the interpretation of demonstratives is context-dependent: a proximal demonstrative ... -
The Acquisition of Negation in Najdi Arabic
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31)This investigation follows the development of negation of a Najdi speaking child. Previous negation studies have treated negation as one unit (NEG) regardless of its form in the adult language (no and not). This investigation ... -
The Role of Individual Differences in the Acceptability of Island Violations in Native and Non-native Speakers
(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31)This study examines the acquisition of syntactic island constraints on wh-movement in English by native speakers of Najdi Arabic to test whether it is possible for second language learners (L2) to acquire syntactic constraints ... -
A semantic study of 'cut' and 'break' verbs in Sorani Kurdish
(University of Kansas, 2012-12-31)Guerssel et al. (1985) proposed Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs) which incorporate a universal set of semantic components to predict the syntactic behavior of cut and break verbs. They state that a CAUSE component ... -
Clausal nominalization in Wolof
(University of Kansas, 2014-08-31)Wolof uses various strategies to express clausal nominalization i.e. genitive nominalization (GN), relative clause nominalization (RC nominalization) and headless relative clause nominalization. This dissertation provides ... -
The word order of subordinate clauses
(University of Kansas, 1918) -
Analysis of Pronunciation Errors of Saudi ESL Learners
(Dept. of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2008-08)This study was conducted as a qualitative investigation to determine the difficulty of /p v r/ to Saudi ESL speakers. More specifically, this study investigated what word environments were most difficult for Saudi speakers -
Grammatically-guided resolution of filler-gap dependencies: An investigation of Chinese multiple dependencies
(University of Kansas, 2014-08-31)Previous studies have provided evidence that the parser avoids positing gaps in grammatically unlicensed positions such as islands, suggesting that the grammar constrains the construction of filler-gap dependencies (e.g., ... -
Paragraph Structure in Arabic and English Expository Discourse
(University of Kansas, 1988-08-19) -
Syntactic Islands in Uyghur
(University of Kansas, 2014-05-31)In this thesis, I investigate the status of syntactic islands in Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken primarily in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. Syntactic islands are constructions originally ... -
Evidence of diachronic sound change: A comparative acoustic study of Seoul and Kyungsang Korean
(University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)The phonetics and phonology of the Kyungsang dialect of Korean is distinct from those of the standard Seoul dialect with regard to segments and lexical pitch. However, whether the distinctive phonetics and phonology of ... -
LANGUAGE ATTITUDES OF IRAQI NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ARABIC: A SOCIOLINGUISTIC INVESTIGATION
(2014-05-20)This study investigates language attitudes of Iraqi native speakers of Arabic towards two Arabic varieties in Iraq, Standard Arabic (SA) and Iraqi Arabic (IA). The sample of the study comprises 196 participants divided ... -
Effects of variance and input distribution on the training of L2 learners' tone categorization
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing ... -
The Clause Structure of Pulaar
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)In this thesis, I investigate the clause structure of Pulaar, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal. Specifically, I look at the ordering of functional heads under the hypothesis on the Hierarchy of Functional Heads in ... -
Perception of sound symbolism in mimetic stimuli: The voicing contrast in Japanese and English
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)Sound symbolism is a concept in which the sound of a word and the meaning of the word are systematically related. Some aspects of sound symbolism have been found to be language-specific and some to be cross-linguistic. The ... -
THE PRODUCTION OF EMPHASIS BY SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS OF ARABIC
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)The purpose of this study was to examine the production of emphasis by American L2 learners of Arabic. Nineteen participants, 5 native speakers and 14 L2 learners participated in a production experiment in which they ... -
The Interaction of Indirect Evidentiality, Temporality and Epistemic Modality in Jordanian Arabic: The Case of Deverbal Agentives
(University of Kansas, 2013-12-31)Abstract Evidentiality is commonly concerned with two basic notions: evidence type and the speaker's commitment towards the truth of the proposition expressed (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Throughout a detailed study of the ... -
Phonation Types in Marathi: An Acoustic Investigation
(University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)This dissertation presents a comprehensive instrumental acoustic analysis of phonation type distinctions in Marathi, an Indic language with numerous breathy voiced sonorants and obstruents. Important new facts about breathy ... -
The Role of the L1 and Individual Differences in L2 Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Features: An ERP Investigation
(University of Kansas, 2013-05-31)This study used ERP (event-related potentials) to examine both the role of the L1 and the role of individual differences in the processing of agreement violations. Theories of L2 acquisition differ with regard to whether ... -
Ideology, Gender Roles, and Pronominal Choice: A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English third person generic pronouns by native speakers of Arabic
(University of Kansas, 2012-05-31)This study is a sociolinguistic investigation of the use of four English generic pronouns (he, she, he or she, singular they) by Arabic-speaking second language learners of English. This study takes a different approach ...