Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
About the Book Series
*This series is no longer actively adding new titles.*
Lenition and Contrast: The Functional Consequences of Certain Phonetically Conditioned Sound Changes
1st Edition
By Naomi Gurevich
January 14, 2014
This book analyzes 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional (meaning maintenance related) considerations. Carefully collecting numerous inventories of consonants, ...
Causes and Consequences of Word Structure
1st Edition
By Jennifer Hay
December 11, 2013
This book explores effects of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Using connectionist modeling, perception and production experiments, and calculations over lexica, Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perception: phonotactics and ...
The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems: The Markedness of Adjectives
1st Edition
By David Beck
September 03, 2013
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. Based on an examination of languages from five different groups - Salishan, Cora, Quechua, ...
Vietnamese Tone: A New Analysis
1st Edition
Edited
By Laurence Horn, Andrea Hoa Pham
September 03, 2013
This new book offers research that will affect further study of tone in Vietnamese and other tonal languages....
Telicity and Durativity: A Study of Aspect in Dëne Suliné (Chipewyan) and German
1st Edition
By Andrea Luise Wilhelm
May 01, 2013
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. The study of events, and of event characteristics, is an important testing ground for theories on the...
Artificial Hearing, Natural Speech: Cochlear Implants, Speech Production, and the Expectations of a High-Tech Society
1st Edition
By Joanna Hart Lowenstein
March 21, 2013
This book explores the interface between speech perception and production through a longitudinal acoustic analysis of the speech of postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (electrode and computer prostheses for the inner ear in cases of nerve deafness). The methodology is based on the work...
Enriched Composition and Inference in the Argument Structure of Chinese
1st Edition
By Ren Zhang
March 21, 2013
As with many other languages, Mandarin Chinese exhibits a rich variety of ways in expressing the arguments of the predicator in a sentence. Unlike other languages, such variation is typically devoid of any formal marking. Previous attempts in explaining such phenomena usually focus on the syntax as...
Interactions between Markedness and Faithfulness Constraints in Vowel Systems
1st Edition
By Viola Giulia Miglio
April 30, 2012
Miglio argues that to assess the relative markedness of a segment, frequency of occurrence in vowel inventories is insufficient when considered on its own. In its analysis of the Great Vowel Shift, this book elaborates a more useful model of a unitary change even in a surface-oriented theory such ...
The Syntax-Information Structure Interface: Evidence from Spanish and English
1st Edition
By Eugenia Casielles-Suárez
April 10, 2012
In the last decade, the notions of topic and focus have come to play an increasingly relevant role in theoretical linguistics. Although these notions are often taken for granted, they are still poorly understood. This study offers a detailed analysis of the precise definitions of these and related ...
The Ups and Downs of Child Language: Experimental Studies on Children's Knowledge of Entailment Relationships and Polarity Phenomena
1st Edition
By Andrea Gualmini
September 12, 2011
The new experimental evidence presented in The Ups and Downs of Child Language shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven useful to the study of children's syntactic competence. Andrea ...
The Semantics of the Future
1st Edition
By Bridget Copley
August 15, 2011
This book builds a semantics for several kinds of future-referring expressions, including will sentences, be going to sentences, and futurates. While there exists previous work on future-referring expressions, this is the first treatment of such a variety of expressions in a formal semantic ...
Raddoppiamento Sintattico in Italian: A Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Dialectical Study
1st Edition
By Doris Angel Borrelli
June 14, 2002
First Published in 2002. The Italian phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico, or sometimes raddoppiamento fonosintattico, has received a vast amount of attention. Long recognized in Italian grammar books, the process consists of the gemination of a word-initial consonant in certain ...