Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2000, Department of Languages

This thesis expands and deepens linguistic theory as well as applies the resulting concepts empirically. The first sections outline linguistic humor theory in general, and Raskin's Semantic Script Theory (SSTH, 1985) as well as the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH, Attardo and Raskin 1991) in particular. The following theoretical sections redefine the GTVH's concept of logical mechanism – as most intricately connected to both the textual-narrative and the cognitive aspects of textual humor – in terms of set theory and expand the arsenal of the GTVH's tools to make it applicable to humorous narratives

Committee: Salvatore Attardo (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Arts and Sciences : Anthropology

Gaelic and Welsh are closely related both linguistically and culturally, yet historical events have placed these languages on diverging paths: one toward death, the other toward revival. According to conventional models of sociolinguistic theory, Gaelic should be a thriving language and Welsh should be imperiled, but, based on recent census figures, the opposite is true. I compare Gaelic and Welsh to present a case that challenges current theoretical frameworks of language change. Through my study, I reveal the nature of social and political pressures on language systems as well as the influence of nationalist ideologies on language survival. The result of this study proves that a national identity that includes language can reverse language shift in endangered or minority languages. One implication for future research includes modification of the current models of language death to account for linguistic nationalism.

Committee: Joseph Foster (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2006, English (as a Second Language)

This study compares the verbal and nonverbal behavior of 33 Arabs and 20 Arab Americans. The study compares the Arabs' use of hada ‘this' and hadak ‘that' against the Arab Americans'. Definitions of these deictic terms provided by grammar books and dictionaries are also examined in this study. The subjects were prompted to refer toobjects as the ones that they liked the best and least, from three distinct groups of objects:different objects; same objects, different color; and identical objects. The subjects'verbal responses along with their nonverbal gestures were recorded. The study suggests,based on Lambda tests of correlation, that the verbal and non-verbal behavior of Arabs is different from that of Arab Americans. It also suggests that the traditional definitions and theoretical explanations of hada ‘this' and hadak ‘that' are not real world properties of the native speakers and have no existence in actual communication.

Committee: Douglas Coleman (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2005, English (as a Second Language)

This study examines and compares the use of [ðIs] and [ðæt] by native speakers of English (NS's) and non-native speakers of English (NNS's) in a deictic study. The study examines traditional definitions of this and that found in dictionaries as well as contemporary definitions of this and that provided by email queries. Sixty subjects were shown pictures of eleven apples and were asked which specific apple they liked best and which specific apple they liked least. The response pairs of NS's and NNS's were compared to see if they were significantly different. Chi-square tests showed that NNS's used [ðIs] as their first response and [ðæt] as their second response significantly more often than NS's. The research suggests that definitions and rules traditionally found in books and which are taught in ESL classes are more descriptive of behavior of NNS's than that of NS's in a real world situation. Thus, this research suggests the possibility that the use of these rules in ESL teaching may lead to speech that is not native-like.

Committee: Douglas Coleman (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2004, English (as a Second Language)

This study examines and compares the nonverbal behavior of native speakers of English (NS) and nonnative speakers of English (NNS) and their interaction with students. Thirty subjects were studied by observing their non-verbal behavior and checking for varying degrees of frequency in use as well as for the possibility of a communicative breakdown. Several variables to classify the non-verbal behavior were designed, among them being hand-raising, frowning, head-nodding / head-shaking, directed gaze, and change in body posture. The subjects were all teachers of English as a Second Language, some of them being teachers within the University of Toledo's English Department, and others being instructors for the American Language Institute (ALI) on campus. All subjects have had some teaching experience, the core of the group ranging from two to 14 years. The choice of variables reflects the root of this study. Hard-science linguistics examines observable, real-world characteristics. It focuses on the presentation of these characteristics, rather than interpreting non-real world concepts. Therefore the variables used for this study reflect this “ability to observe”. These variables (non-verbal behavior of observed individuals) had to conform to a previously designed framework that had the purpose of limiting the interpretability of the observed behavior. In order to exclude researcher bias as much as possible, only those instances in which the non-verbal signal conformed to this framework were recorded.

Committee: Douglas Coleman (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

In traditional English grammar, a “transitive” verb was simply one that could take a direct object; thus, a verb was either transitive or intransitive. Traditional grammars of Russian have likewise considered as transitive only those verbs capable of taking an object in the accusative case. This traditional view ignores those nouns that have direct object-like qualities but are found in other grammatical cases—such as the dative, genitive, or instrumental—which arguably reflect a lower degree of transitivity. Hopper and Thompson (1980) proposed parameters according to which the transitivity of a clause could be judged. Those parameters included the affectedness of the (grammatical) object, the volitionality of the subject, the aspect (telic vs. atelic) of the verb, and the individuation of the object (its “distinctness… from the [subject] and… from its own background”). Hopper and Thompson further proposed a Transitivity Hypothesis, according to which opposing features of transitivity could not be obligatorily combined. The present study applies Hopper and Thompson's parameters of transitivity to the choice of case of objects in Czech and Russian. For instance, the Russian verb dvigat'‘move' will take an object in the instrumental case (generally a sign of lower transitivity) if a person is moving one's own leg (low in terms of distinctness or individuation): dvigat' nogoj; but if a person moves someone else's leg (higher in individuation), the object will appear in the accusative, indicating higher transitivity: dvigat' nogu. For this study, I have gathered examples of this sort of case variation in Czech and Russian from dictionaries, Google searches, online corpora, and native speaker intuitions. The vast majority confirm the predictions of Hopper and Thompson. The relatively rare examples that contradict the Transitivity Hypothesis are also considered, but these usually turn out to be only apparent contradictions. The present study also seeks to resolve the more (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Daniel Collins (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

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

In natural, continuous speech, words are not always produced in the “canonical” way as described in the dictionary. For example, the phrase “right berry” can sound like “ripe berry”. The research question for the current study is: how native listeners resolve the ambiguity quickly. More specifically, how “words” undergo sound changes in connected speech are stored in the mind, and how contextual factors such as prosodic boundary information influence the processing of this kind of ambiguous words. Two eye movement monitoring experiments investigated listeners' processing of ambiguous words in connected speech. The ambiguities in the experiment stimuli resulted from two types of phonological sound changes in phonetic context - English coronal assimilation and Putonghua Tone2 sandhi. Three different kinds of prosodic boundaries (Prosodic Word Boundary, Intermediate Phrase Boundary, Intonation Phrase Boundary) were inserted in between the critical word and its following context word to elicit different levels of assimilated tokens in natural speech. In each trial of the experiment, the participants' task was to choose the most appropriate one from four pictures on the computer screen upon hearing a pre-recorded auditory sentence that contains the ambiguous words. The results are most consistent with the proposed modified exemplar processing account, in which both abstract categories such as “word” and “prosodic boundary”, together with each episode of sound change is stored in the listener's mental lexicon, and are called to act in concert to help with the mapping of the incoming acoustic signal to the word to be retrieved. The results provide new evidence that listeners use prosodic boundary information in a very early stage of lexical processing and that contrastive stress causes a heavier load of processing. They also support previous claims that IP boundaries trigger semantic wrap-up.

Committee: Shari Speer (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Spanish and Portuguese

In contrast to languages such as English, Spanish exhibits a dual placement of the demonstrative: Ese hombre DEM N El hombre ese ART N DEM ‘That man' I account for the Spanish postnominal demonstrative by investigating data in the synchronic and diachronic corpora to track the source of the demonstrative construction and its textual context. In this vein, a framework that categorizes referring expressions with regards to their information structure better explains the Spanish data and the development of the construction in question. Using an applicable discourse framework, the diachronic data is then compared with synchronic examples in order to elucidate the function of the marked syntax of the demonstrative. A specific aim of the present investigation is to clarify the role of the post-posed demonstrative in the “pejorative” use frequently commented on in the literature. In fact, the displaced demonstrative is found to encode primarily hearer-old information where the affective or qualitative function is only the most salient part of a larger pattern. This pattern extends from the first attestation of Spanish postnominal construction in the 14th century up to the present day.

Committee: Dieter Wanner (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

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

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This study examined the acquisition of tense-aspect in toki ‘when' clauses in Japanese among adult learners of Japanese as a second or foreign language. The objective of the study was to investigate if native languages (Language Transfer Hypothesis) and/ or inherent semantic characteristics of verbs (Aspect Hypothesis) play a role in the selection of the -ru/-ta endings in toki ‘when' clauses. The experimental study was conducted with 37 participants in Experiment 1 (with Achievement verbs in the toki clause position) and 34 participants in Experiment 2 (with Accomplishment, Activity and Stative verbs in the toki clause position) using a Truth Value Judgment Task. The experimental results suggest that the Language Transfer Hypothesis seems to be working independently for the Durative verbs (Experiment 2) category, while the Aspect Hypothesis seems to be independently working for the Achievement verbs (Experiment 1) category. There were two sets of results obtained that were not predicted by the two hypotheses. The Language Transfer Hypothesis does not predict the good performances of the Chinese and English speakers for the S1 ru toki S2 ta pattern in the Durative category, while the Aspect Hypothesis does not predict the absence of over-use of -ta with Accomplishment verbs in the present study. The first unpredicted result can possibly be explained by offering another hypothesis, that learners are also sensitive to the durative semantic aspect (or lack thereof) of the verbs in question. As for the second result that deviated from the predictions, it can be conjectured that learners do not focus on the endpoint of the Accomplishment verbs, but rather treat them as Activity verbs with a finite duration. These results have important pedagogical implications in that it may be useful to introduce the inherent semantic characteristics of the verbs such as durativity, telicity and punctuality in the Japanese language classroom and teaching materials. Since the learners se (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mari Noda (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

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

This study investigates how prosodic and contextual information affects the way syntactically ambiguous sentences in English and Korean are understood in spoken language comprehension. English materials used include rarely studied present participial constructions. Korean materials include a type of relative clause that contains empty pronouns as one of arguments, a structure that was never examined before. When these sentence materials were presented without biasing contexts, results showed that prosodic phrasing largely determined meaning assignment. These results extended previous research that demonstrated prosodic effects on syntactically ambiguous structures. Results from experiments that manipulated both prosodic and contextual information showed that prosodic information was still effective even in the presence of biasing contextual information. Taken together, these results demonstrate the robust effect of prosodic information and necessitate the inclusion of prosodic component in any model of spoken language processing.

Committee: Shari Speer (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This study investigates the processing strategies learners of Japanese employ while reading Japanese. Language researchers theorize that native speakers process sentences incrementally. However, little is known about processing in a second language when the first and second languages are typologically different. For example, English and Chinese take an SVO word order with little or no overt Case marking while Japanese and Korean take an SOV word order with overt Case marking. In SVO languages, verb information may provide upcoming postverbal information, and in SOV languages, preverbal information (Case information) may provide upcoming information for argument and verb. Based on these assumptions, this study examines how groups of Japanese language learners with different L1s process sentences in reading. Of special interest is whether learners process arguments and adjuncts differently before reaching a verb. Equally, of another piece of interest is how each learner group reads each phrase of a sentence. Experiments with self-paced reading tasks were conducted with two intermediate and one advanced Japanese level of English groups, an advanced Japanese level of Chinese group, an advanced Japanese level of Korean group, and a control native speaking group. Results of the experiments revealed that advanced learners as well as the control group showed some sensitivity to the arguments/adjuncts differentiation. English-speaking intermediate groups failed to demonstrate the distinction, but all learner groups provided some indication that they tried to employ incremental processing in a way that seemed most appropriate for their ability level. When reading times at each phrase are examined, advanced learner groups showed similar reading patterns regardless of their L1s, but groups of a different proficiency level exhibited reading patterns distinctive to each group in terms of where the reading times were elevated. We argue that distinctive patterns occur because learn (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mineharu Nakayama (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Linguistics

A central question within morphological theory is whether an adequate description of inflection necessitates connections between and among inflectionally related forms, i.e. paradigmatic structure. Researchers have recently shown that paradigmatic models are capable of describing periphrasis and paradigmatic gaps, but have failed to provide evidence that an adequate description of gaps requires reference to paradigmatic structure. In this dissertation I argue that crucial evidence that paradigmatic structure underpins gaps is to be found in speakers' reactions to inflectional defectiveness. I show through a series of experiments and distributional statistics that gaps in the genitive plural of Modern Greek nouns and the first person singular non-past of Russian verbs arose from speakers' insecurity over competition between paradigmatic patterns of inflection. The appearance of the gaps can thus be adequately explained only with reference to the inflectional paradigm. I formalize this approach in a Word and Paradigm model incorporating multidimensional inheritance hierarchies. At the same time, historical causation is not to be confused with synchronic structure. The distributional patterns of the Modern Greek and Russian gaps resemble those which previous researchers have used to posit that gaps are optimal failures – synchronically epiphenomenal to productive word formation processes. However, a detailed analysis of speakers' reactions to the Greek and Russian data shows gaps and productive inflectional forms to pattern differently. I interpret this to mean that the Greek and Russian gaps have become disassociated from their original causative factors, leaving the former as idiosyncratic facts of their respective languages. This conclusion throws previous gaps-as-epiphenomena accounts into doubt. This dissertation makes a substantive contribution on three levels. First, it adds a new type of evidence to the body of research on paradigmatic gaps by exploring speaker (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Brian Joseph (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Linguistics

Word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS)tagging, and sense tagging are important steps in various Chinese natural language processing (CNLP) systems. Unknown words, i.e., words that are not in the dictionary or training data used in a CNLP system, constitute a major challenge for each of these steps. This dissertation is concerned with developing hybrid models that effectively combine statistical, knowledge-based, and machine learning approaches for Chinese unknown word resolution, including the identification, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and sense tagging of Chinese unknown words. What makes Chinese unknown word resolution hard is the limited information available for predicting the properties of unknown words, and for this reason it is crucial to make optimal use of information that is available. To this end, this research explores two central ideas and aims to achieve two major goals. First, the morphological, syntactic, and semantic information of the component characters or morphemes of an unknown word provides useful insights into its structural and semantic properties. The first goal of this work is to develop novel algorithms that capture such insights. To integrate unknown word identification with word segmentation, the notion of character-based tagging is adopted to model the tendency of individual characters to combine with adjacent characters to form words in different contexts. To predict the POS categories of unknown words, morphological rules that encode knowledge about the relationship between the POS categories of unknown words and those of their component morphemes are developed. Finally, to classify unknown words into appropriate semantic categories in a Chinese thesaurus, rules that capture the regularities in the relationship between the semantic categories of unknown words and those of their component morphemes are developed; information-theoretical models are used to compute the associations between individual morphemes and semantic categorie (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Walt Meurers (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, Linguistics

This dissertation is about “syllable fusion” in Hong Kong Cantonese. Syllable fusion is a connected-speech phenomenon whereby boundaries between syllables are blurred together in a way that suggests an intermediate level of grouping between the syllable and the larger intonational phrase. Previous studies of this phenomenon have focused on extreme cases — i.e. whole segments (consonants and/or vowels) are deleted at the relevant syllable boundary. By contrast, in this dissertation, “syllable fusion” refers to a variety of changes affecting a sequence of two syllables that range along a continuum from “mild” to “extreme” blending together of the syllables. Less extreme changes include assimilation, consonant lenition and so on, any substantial weakening or effective deletion of the oral gesture(s) of the segment(s) contiguous to the syllable boundary, and the sometimes attendant resyllabifications that create “fused forms”. More extreme fusion can simplify contour tones and “merge” the qualities of vowels that would be separated by an onset or coda consonant at more “normal” degrees of disjuncture between words. The idea that motivates the experiments described in this dissertation is that the occurrence of syllable fusion marks prosodic grouping at the level of the “foot”, a phonological constituent which has been proposed to account for prosodic phenomena such as the process of tone sandhi and neutral tone in other varieties of Chinese. If syllable fusion marks the grouping together of syllables into feet, there must be factors similar to the factors that influence the occurrence of tone sandhi and neutral tone in other varieties of Chinese that influence the occurrence and the degree of syllable fusion. Discovering these factors would allow us to understand the “foot” structure for Cantonese. Five factors were identified and tested in this dissertation: speech rate, word frequency, word length, morphosyntactic relationship, and prosodic position of words. Three ex (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Beckman (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Linguistics

Much current thinking in the field of linguistic variation assumes that speakers actively manipulate linguistic variables for local social purposes. While broad social structures such as class, ethnicity, and gender continue to shape the basic questions that variationists ask, attention to speakers' context-driven uses of variables is gaining prominence. Eckert (2002) addresses this shift in her description of the three “waves” of linguistic variation studies. Critically, third-wave studies assume that speakers (consciously or not) use linguistic variables to construct identities situated within local social contexts. The claim that particular uses of linguistic variants index dynamic and ultimately supra-local social meanings entails that speakers recognize links among different levels of social organization. Despite the upsurge of ethnographic work in sociolinguistics, the latter claim has yet to be fully supported or even well investigated, partly, I argue, for lack of an adequate theoretical framework for speakers' perceptions. This study explores sociological consciousness – the recognition of links among the levels of social structure – as a factor conditioning linguistic variation. The sociologist C. Wright Mills' (1959) notion of the “sociological imagination” is used as a framework. The sociological imagination is the quality of mind that allows one to conceptualize daily life in terms of society-wide social forces. According to Mills, those who possess well-developed sociological imaginations manage to understand personal troubles and public issues as the products of historical events, social structures, and biography—the three “coordinate points.” The speech community under investigation is Worthington, Ohio, a mostly white, upper-middle class community lying immediately to the north of Columbus. Worthington was founded in 1803 by well-educated, Episcopalian settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut, and some of the current residents work vigorously to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Donald Winford (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation examines the pitch patterns of questions in Beijing Mandarin. The conventional view is that since pitch is used to distinguish lexical tones, Mandarin must not cue questions via pitch manipulations. However, this study finds both global and localized F0 cues that depend on pragmatics and focus structures, as well as on syntax. Pitch range plays an important role in both global and localized F0 cues in syntactically-unmarked questions and syntactically-marked ma-particle questions. With respect to the pragmatics of questions, Echo-questions which express such pragmatic meanings as surprise or incredulity are associated with a globally expanded pitch range and a raised top line in both syntactic types of questions. While the global expansion of pitch range is performed to a smaller degree in InfoSeek-questions, the expansion of pitch range is more localized over the last noun phrase, which often functions as the question focus in yes-no questions. The intonational manipulations in interaction with the pragmatics of questions found in this study refute earlier claims that prosodic cues are important only in the absence of a syntactic cue or that a certain intonation pattern is consistently produced in association with a syntactically-based question type. Nonetheless, syntax contributes to the formation of the intonation patterns of questions, such that when syntactically-unmarked and marked yes-no questions are uttered to express comparable pragmatic meanings, both global and localized F0 cues are exaggerated when no syntactic cues are available. The intonational patterns of questions also interact with stress. In question-word questions, the question-word is inherently focused. As for question intonation and sentential stress, the expansion of pitch range associated with pragmatic narrow focus is realized to a greater extent in questions. The compression of pitch range, following narrow focus, is not realized as much in questions due to the expansion (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marjorie Chan (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Linguistics

This dissertation describes the design and evaluation of a prosodically sensitive concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system for Korean within the Festival TTS framework (Taylor et al., 1998). The primary task that this dissertation undertakes is to build a synthesis system that can test the idea that a speech segment is affected by its prosodic context and is subject to continuous allophonic and categorical allomorphic variation. There are three subtasks to the primary task. The first subtask is to model the allomorphic variation of Korean and to investigate the validity of using hand-written linguistically motivated morphophonological rules in the form of grapheme-to-phoneme (GTP) conversion rules. The evaluation of the implemented GTP module showed that taking advantage of linguistic knowledge could greatly reduce the amount of training material required by any machine-learning approach and that the error analysis is more informative and straightforward. The second subtask is to model positionally-conditioned allophonic variation and to motivate segmental correlates of prosodic categories with a view to designing a prosodically sensitive diphone database. From a corpus of prosodically labeled read speech, we created a prosodically sensitive diphone database, selecting four different prosodic versions of the same diphone. The last subtask is to build a model of Korean prosody, i.e., a model of phrasing, fundamental frequency contour, and duration, using a corpus that has been morpho-syntactically parsed and prosodically labeled following the K-ToBI labeling conventions (Jun, 2000, 1998 & 1993). Only the model of phrasing was implemented, trained from a set of morphosyntactic and textual distance features, and it can predict the location of accentual and intonational phrase breaks. The results of these subtasks were incorporated into the TTS system and the naturalness of the output from the system was evaluated. A listening experiment performed on eighty n (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Beckman (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Linguistics

This dissertation motivates and describes the Generalized Immediate Dominance/Linear Precedence (GIDLP) formalism: a formalism capable of serving as a processing backbone for linearization-based grammars in the Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) framework. Complementing the work on the formalism, the thesis defines and implements an efficient parsing algorithm for GIDLP grammars. Representing a prominent tradition within HPSG, linearization-based HPSG assumes that the domain of word order can be larger than the local tree. This supports elegant and general linguistic analyses for (relatively) free word order languages, including the possibility of licensing discontinuous constituents. For processing with an HPSG grammar, most systems depend on parsing algorithms that make use of a phrase structure backbone – a part of the grammar that has been set aside and given a distinguished role in the parsing process – thereby contrasting with those that view parsing as a general constraint solving task, where general methods for logical reasoning are to be applied to the constraints present in an HPSG grammar. Processing backbones support efficient parsing algorithms, but they restrict the class of HPSG theories that can be encoded to those employing a phrase structure backbone, which excludes linearization-HPSG grammars. The GIDLP formalism solves the dilemma between the desire to encode linguistically general and elegant linearization-HPSG analyses and the need for a processing backbone. GIDLP allows linguists to specify grammars with linear precedence constraints that operate within explicitly declared word order domains extending beyond the local tree as well as immediate dominance rules in which the grammar writer can arrange the right-hand side as to minimize the number of parsing hypotheses that must be explored. The GIDLP parsing algorithm developed in the thesis supports efficient processing by making direct use of linear precedence constraints during parsin (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: W. Detmar Meurers (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Spanish and Portuguese

The effects of linguistic experience on the perceptual processing and identification of phonological dialect variation were investigated in a series of psycholinguistic experiments with native speakers of Spanish from Mexico and Puerto Rico. Perceptual processing of dialect variation was assessed using bisyllabic words produced by female speakers of Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish with a speeded naming task and a lexical decision task. Identification of dialect variation was assessed using bisyllabic words with a two-alternative forced-choice classification task. The test stimuli used in all three tasks contained either a word-final /n/, a syllable-final /r/, or a syllable-final /s/. These phonological variables were chosen because they exhibit phonological variation to different degrees in the two dialects being studied here. The results from the speeded naming task show a significant main effect for phonological variable, with words containing syllable-final /s/ resulting in the slowest naming (reaction) time. Factors that significantly interacted with other factors were sex, listener dialect, and speaker dialect. The results from the lexical decision task show a significant effect for phonological variable, where words containing syllable-final /s/ resulted again in the slowest reaction times. Interestingly, both Mexican and Puerto Rican participants were biased to label Mexican stimuli as a word, even when the stimuli were nonwords. This bias was not found for the Puerto Rican stimuli. The dialect identification task's results show that overall listeners most accurately identified the speaker's dialect when they produced words containing syllable-final /s/, while the dialect of speakers producing words containing syllable-final /r/ was least accurate. The Mexican listeners were more accurate at identifying their own dialect than they were identifying a dialect other than their own, as were the Puerto Rican listeners. These results are easily modeled and account (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Terrell Morgan (Advisor) Subjects: Language, Linguistics