Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, French and Italian

French object clitics are reportedly difficult for L2 learners (e.g., Towell and Hawkins, 1994) due, among other factors, to their redundancy and lack of saliency in auditory and written input. An instructional intervention called processing instruction (PI) was specifically designed to assist learners in the acquisition of difficult L2 structures. PI is expected to yield better results than more traditional types of instruction (TI) because it uses structured input (SI) activities to alter the way learners process input, while TI uses production drills to develop automaticity. Although the benefits of PI for the processing of object pronouns in Spanish is well documented (e.g., VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993), very few studies have been conducted on the pronouns in French (e.g., Santamaria, 2007) and it is yet unclear whether PI is also efficient on the structure in French. Additionally, investigations on how instruction can improve the learning of grammatical gender and number marking function of object pronouns are lacking. Yet, such research is crucial, particularly among Anglophone L2 French learners whose L1 does not designate lexical noun referents with grammatical gender. In this dissertation project, two online experiments were conducted to explore the effects of instruction type (PI vs. TI), pronoun gender and number, and participants' L2 proficiency level on the processing and production of the French object clitics, le, la, and les. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of instruction on gender and number learning and included native speakers as a control group (n = 42). Experiment 2 examined only the effects of instruction on gender in the L2 learners. Student participants were 133 English-speaking learners from first- and second-semester French classes: half of them were trained with PI (using structured input activities), while the other half received TI (using production-based activities). Their improvement was assessed by (1) a sentence-picture matc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Wynne Wong (Advisor); Kiwako Ito (Advisor); Janice Aski (Committee Member); Leslie Moore (Committee Member); Joe Barcroft (Committee Member) Subjects: Foreign Language; Language; Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Linguistics

This dissertation presents a formal theory of Serbo-Croatian grammar. The theory predicts acceptable form/meaning pairs for a substantial chunk of Serbo-Croatian. In particular, we analyze Serbo-Croatian declarative and interrogative main clauses, embedded clauses, a couple of different types of nominal modification, control and predication, as well pro- and encliticization. Linguistic expressions are represented as triples of typed terms, with each typed term modeling one of the following sets of properties of a linguistic sign: semantic (i.e. truth-conditional meaning), tectogrammatical (i.e. syntactic combinatorial properties), and, finally, phenogrammatical properties which specify the expression's linearization possibilities. The focus of our work is on word order in Serbo-Croatian, which is very free in some respects but extremely rigid in others. With phenogrammar and tectogrammar as distinct components, we can isolate word order problems from tectogrammatical and semantic combination, and state theory-internal phenogrammatical generalizations. This is particularly important for the analysis of 2P enclitics, whose placement cannot be adequately characterized tectogrammatically. The most elaborate component is phenogrammar. We postulate many different phenogrammatical types and modes of combination. This enables us to create islands of fixed word order, while still allowing free reordering of higher-level phenogrammatical objects. Of special significance are phenogrammatical terms which denote sets of strings. Such terms represent possible pronunciations of expressions which can be linearized multiple ways without a change in meaning. Essentially, we are modeling semantically insignificant reordering as phenogrammatical indeterminacy. Our choice of grammatical architecture is empirically motivated, but methodological in nature. This dissertation purports to show that a decent theory of Serbo-Croatian word order can be given in a framework which does disting (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Carl Pollard (Advisor); Brian Joseph (Committee Member); Michael White (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics; Logic; Slavic Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Linguistics

This dissertation has three interrelated goals: The main goal is an analysis of Czech clitics, units of grammar on the borderline between morphology and syntax with rather peculiar ordering properties both relative to the whole clause and to each other. We examine the actual set of clitics, their rather rigid ordering properties, and finally the properties of so-called clitic climbing. The analysis evaluates previous research, but it also provides new insights, especially in the position of the clitic cluster and in the constraints on clitic climbing. We show that many of the constraints regarding position of the clitic cluster suggested in previous research do not hold. We also argue that cases when clitics do not follow the first constituent are in fact not exceptions in clitic placement but instead unusual frontings. The second goal is the development of a framework within Higher Order Grammar (HOG) supporting a transparent and modular treatment of word order. Unlike previous versions of HOG, we work with signs (containing phonological, syntactic and potentially other information) as actual objects of the grammar. Apart from that, we build on the simplicity and elegance of the pre-formal part of the linearization framework within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Finally, the third objective is to test the result of the second goal by applying it on the results of the first goal.

Committee: Carl Pollard (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics