Books in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series

This book presents rigorous and criterial definitions of the major parts of speech - noun, verb and adjective - that account both for their syntactic behaviour and for their observed typological variation.

Using acoustic studies of Bernese, Hungarian, Levantine Arabic and Madurese, the author argues that differences in geminate timing are ultimately correlated according to whether a language is syllable or mora-timed.

This book investigates two prominent issues with regard to the inflected infinitive - the syntactic distribution of the Portuguese inflected infinitive, and its origin and development from Early Romance.

A detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories, this text also includes a quantitive study of phonation types in Khoesan languages and a study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around.

This book provides an analysis of two theories of language acquisition: the theory that acquisition is primarily mediated by innate properties of language provided by universal grammar, and the opposing theory that language is acquired based on the patterns in the ambient language.

In this work, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of "episodic genericity", existential presuppositions and contextual restrictions of generics.

An exploration of the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences and their intonational differences: It's raining? and It's raining. To account for the differences, the text gives a compositional account of rising and falling declaratives under which declarative form expresses commitment to the prepositional content of the declarative.

In linguistic study, tone is usually equated with pitch. This text argues that this view of tone is problematic. Its acoustic analysis of tone in Vietnamese uses data from various speakers to show that the phonation features of breathiness and creakiness correlate much more closely with tonal perceptions than pitch height alone.

Explores the interface between speech perception and production through a longitudinal acoustic analysis of the speech of postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants. This book also examines how cochlear implants are portrayed in dramatic and documentary television programs, the scientific accuracy of those portrayals, and more.

Through rigorous and well-documented experiments, this thesis presents pioneering work on the processing of a variety of distinct types of ellipsis sentences, concentrating on the role played by focus, intonation and parallelism.

This book presents a detailed and enlightening examination of the effects of duration and sonority on the patterns of positional restriction of contour tones.

This dissertation investigates the syntax of possession in Japanese within the framework of the Minimalist Program. The focus is on how possessive semantics is represented in syntax when there seems to be no designated verb of possession.

Analyzing the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the Japanese particle mo, roughly equivalent to the English too, this book shows how the complex mechanism of the constraints accounts for its discourse function.

Interest in statistical natural language generation is rapidly increasing. This work sheds important light from theoretical linguistics on the type of information crucial to statistical NLG algorithms.

This book analyses 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional considerations.

Investigates various phenomena affecting both stressed and unstressed vowels in Romance languages and analyses vowel reduction, which involves a change of vowel quality in stressless syllables that favours vowel qualities that are maximally distinguishable from one another.

It has been claimed that 'category neutrality' where a word or a phrase is used simultaneously with more than one syntactic category, does not exist. This work shows that it does exist in English. This work not only challenges the current thinking, but also raises foundational questions about the nature of ambiguity.

This work presents the first experimental study of articulatory dynamics of Russian and of secondary articulents in general. Special focus is on the nature of positional markedness scales (Optimality Theory), a key concept in phonological theory.

A significant contribution to the current debate on the role of phonetic optimalisation, this book presents a formal and unified characterization of lenition patterns.

This book examines the phonological phenomenon of compensatory lengthening, wherein the loss of a consonant or vowel triggers a compensatory lengthening of another phonetic element.

Baauw discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects.

This dissertation introduces the notion 'existential faithfulness', which plays a crucial role in the analysis of dissimilation, feature movement and the emergence of the unmarked in reduplication.

With a database of over 180 languages and dialects, this book proposes a typology of the phonological patterning of ejectives, drawing together widely-scattered information.

Studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. This book outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure.

Telicity and durativity are notions which have become increasingly influential in both the semantic and the syntactic. This book studies the linguistic representation of events by examining the relevance of two salient event characteristics - telicity and durativity - to the grammatical system of natural language.

This book provides a unified theory of moraicity, contending that there are two types of weight labelled coerced and distinctive. Using optimality theory, Moren challenges traditional theories of vowel/consonant dichotomy and inherent moraicity.