With the rise of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among adults in the United States, understanding the processes of trauma, trauma related disorders, and the long-term impact of living with them is an area of continued focus for researchers. This is especially a concern in the case of current and former military service members (veterans), whose work activities and deployment cycles place them at an increased risk of exposure to trauma-inducing experiences but who have a low rate of self-referral to healthcare professionals. There is thus an urgent need for developing procedures for early diagnosis and treatment. The present study examines how the tools and findings of the field of linguistics may contribute to the field of trauma research. Previous research has shown that cognition and language production are closely linked. This study focuses on the role of prosody in PTSD and pilots a procedure for the data collection and analysis. Data consist of monologic talk from a sample of student-veterans and analyzed with speech software (Praat) for pauses greater than 250 milliseconds per 100 words. The pause frequency was compared to a PCL-5 score, an assessment used to check for PTSD symptoms and evaluate need for further assessment and possible diagnosis of PTSD. This pilot study found the methods successfully elicited data that could be used to measure and test the research questions. Although the findings of the study were inconclusive due to limitations of the participant pool, it found that the research model proved effect as a model for future linguistic research on trauma.

Temporal adverbial clauses are present in many forms of writing. These clauses can impact the complexity of a sentence. Sentence complexity can have some effect on how readers with a diagnosed reading disability, such as dyslexia, process language. This study incorporated Hawkins’ (1994) theories about Early Immediate Constituency into a self-paced reading task designed to evaluate whether or not temporal adverbial clause positioning caused the main clause of the sentence to become more difficult to understand. Hawkins theorized that main clauses appearing at the beginning of a sentence would create an environment where a reader could reach sentence comprehension faster (CITE). The experiment used software called Linger to present the self-paced reading task. Eight participants – four with dyslexia and four without – volunteered to read sentence items from a college level textbook that had temporal adverbial clauses appearing before and after the main clause of sentences. Statistical significance in the findings show that participants read sentences more quickly when the temporal adverbial clause appeared before the main clause; however, more research is required to determine the difference between sentences fronted by adverbial clauses and sentences fronted by main clauses.

This is a constructed language that is primarily based on getting rid of Morphological and Syntactical ambiguity. Much of the inspiration I took when making this language came from Latin and Ancient Greek, adopting the things that make those languages beautiful, and changing the things that make them difficult. The main thing I wanted this language to accomplish was to achieve maximum specificity, clarity, and complexity of thought, and therefore I focused heavily on clause formation and making this a highly synthetic language.

Determining guilty parties in homicide cases is not always straight forward. The more tools investigators have to assist them, the better. 911 calls are often the least influenced form of linguistic evidence, in the sense that the caller has not yet been influenced by lawyers, law enforcement, etc.. This paper analyzes the reliability of using the Considering Offender Probability in Statements (COPS) scale and concordance program to evaluate veracity in 911 homicide calls. To do this, six 911 homicide calls from Mesa, Arizona were transcribed, evaluated based on the COPS scale, and put through a concordance program. The results showed high reliability with the COPS scale and varying reliability with the concordance program, with benefits and drawbacks to each. This study unveils the need for more research to be done on 911 calls.

Languages have long been studied through the rhythm class framework, which discriminates them into separate classes on the basis of shared rhythmic properties. Originally these differences were attributed to the isochronous timing of different prosodic units, such as stress intervals in “stress-timed” languages and syllables in “syllable-timed” languages. More recent work has turned to durational metrics as a means of evaluating rhythm class, by measuring the variability and proportion of segmental intervals in the speech stream. Both isochrony and durational metrics are no longer viewed as correlative with natural language rhythm, but durational metrics in particular have remained prevalent in the literature. So long as the conclusions of durational metrics are not overextended, their analysis can provide a useful mechanism for assessing the compatibility of a language with a given rhythm class by way of comparative analysis. This study therefore presents a durational-metric comparison of Scottish Gaelic, a language which has frequently been described as stress-timed but has never been empirically tested for rhythm class, with English, a prototypical and well-studied example of a stress-timed language. The Gaelic metric scores for %V (percentage of vocalic content), ΔV (standard deviation in vocalic interval length), and ΔC (standard deviation in consonantal interval length) (Ramus et al. 1999) are shown to be very similar to those measured for English, indicating that the language displays similar patterns of durational variability and segmental proportion typically ascribed to a rhythmically stress-timed language. This provides clear support for the classification of Scottish Gaelic as stress-timed.

This grammar describes the inner workings of the language of the Fwonnel Peninsula, known in its English translations as Fwonnel, Arojaunzan, or, most succinctly, Arojun. Contained within this 288-page paper are sections dedicated to Phonology, Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Example Texts, and various other elements of the world that I have created. Arojun is a moderately analytic language that features a Verb-Object-Subject word order, a pronoun-tense auxiliary system, and two orthography systems with historic significance. Connected to the language and included within this paper are sections on original Calendar Systems, Music Theory and Notation, Naming Traditions, Geography of the Fwonnel Peninsula, Religions, Two Dictionaries, a collection of common phrases important to learning the language and interacting with the people, and an in-depth look at the full political and linguistic history of the Fwonnel Peninsula. The Sample Text section includes several lines of interlinear glosses translating popular scenes from television shows from English(or Japanese) into Arojun, videos of which were posted to my YouTube Channel, Agma Schwa, over the course of the past year. This language, and in essence, the entirety of the fictional nation of El Fwonk Casanosia, has been building up to this point since 2007, when I was only seven years old. I may have needed to occasionally bend over backwards to make the less logical, yet emotionally significant, parts of this language and history reach a point of satisfactory suspension of disbelief, but I believe that it turned out wonderfully. Either way, this project took a great deal of effort, by far the largest project that I have worked on in my life.

In this thesis, I explore Cognate Object Constructions COCs (e.g. The clown "laughed" a creepy "laugh") through three research questions: (1) What verbs can accept Cognate Objects COs? (2) Why can these verbs accept COs and other verbs cannot? and (3) How are COCs derived? I demonstrate that Sorace's Hierarchy sheds light on which verbs can accept COs and which cannot by explaining the discrepancies in grammaticality judgments that exist in the literature. I then argue that Hale and Keyser's Conflation account of COCs is not minimalist because it relies on a phenomenon that can be reduced to Merge. After commenting and repairing their account, I provide an outline for a more minimalist framework, which I refer to as "Problems of Projection Extensions" PoP+, that focuses on MERGE, workspaces, labeling theory, phases, and determinacy. Inside this framework, I then develop my own account that depends on only Internal Merge and the constraint in English against stranded articles. With my account situated in this PoP+ framework, I am able to approach the research questions from a syntactic perspective, arguing that the Unergative Restriction on COCs is a result of a determinacy violation in the derivation of Unaccusative COCs. Finally, I point out that, being situated in the PoP+ framework, my account opens COCs up to further investigation not possible before.

Over the centuries, definite articles in Romance languages have expanded their use to include generic, collective, and abstract nouns, essentially becoming noun markers. This usage is not confined to just a few languages, either, but is found in most, if not all, Romance languages, major and minor. This thesis examines the question of how this came to be, whether through diffusion from one language to all others, or through independent parallel development. I first trace the history of definite articles in three major Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Italian, starting with the emergence of the definite article in Late Latin as it derived from Classic Latin demonstratives. It includes an analysis of the use of definite articles in six works of literature, one in each language from the late thirteenth century, and one in each language from around the year 1500. The results show definite articles were used more frequently than expected in the earlier Spanish work, perhaps hinting at diffusion from Spain. Nevertheless, placing these results in historical context, I argue that this use arose through independent parallel development through the process that gave birth to definite articles in the first place - grammaticalization.

This dissertation investigates the precise degree to which prosody and syntax are related. One possibility is that the syntax-prosody mapping is one-to-one (“isomorphic”) at an underlying level (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Selkirk 1996, 2011, Ito & Mester 2009). This predicts that prosodic units should preferably match up with syntactic units. It is also possible that the mapping between these systems is entirely non-isomorphic, with prosody being influenced by factors from language perception and production (Wheeldon & Lahiri 1997, Lahiri & Plank 2010). In this work, I argue that both perspectives are needed in order to address the full range of phonological phenomena that have been identified in English and related languages, including word-initial lenition/flapping, word-initial segment-deletion, and vowel reduction in function words, as well as patterns of pitch accent assignment, final-pronoun constructions, and the distribution of null complementizer allomorphs. In the process, I develop models for both isomorphic and non-isomorphic phrasing. The former is cast within a Minimalist syntactic framework of Merge/Label and Bare Phrase Structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), while the latter is characterized by a stress-based algorithm for the formation of phonological domains, following Lahiri & Plank (2010).

ABSTRACT

This dissertation investigates the copular/locative and existential predications in Arabic. The main focus is on the typology and syntax of the existential predications. The negation of such predications reveals interesting results. The Negative Existential Cycle (Croft, 1991) is a model that describes the process by which verbal negators arise from existential negators. I discuss data of existentials and negative existentials from Standard Arabic, Saudi Arabic dialect, and Gulf Pidgin Arabic.

I argue for canonical vs. non-canonical word orders in copular/locative and existential sentences, respectively. I examine the grammaticalization path of the existentials from their locative content in each language form. Then, I investigate the syntactic word order of the copular/locative and existential constructions in each variety.

I investigate the negation of the existential construction in each variety. First, Standard Arabic is shown to be at stage A in the Negative Existential Cycle. The Hijazi and Najdi Arabic spoken by elders show further developments. Hijazi Arabic appears to be at stage B, while Najdi Arabic appears to be at stage B and an intermediate stage B ~ C. Second, I show that in Saudi Arabic the negative existential has been extended to the verbal domain. Saudi Arabic is at stages A, B, and B ~ C, while Qassimi Arabic is at stages A and B. Third, I show that the existential construction in Gulf Pidgin Arabic is only negated by the negative existential predicate, while the verbal sentences are negated by the negative existential and the verbal negator. Therefore, Gulf Pidgin Arabic is at stages B and C in the Negative Existential Cycle.

Finally, I discuss the syntax of copular/locative and existential predications in each variety. I propose a unified syntactic structure. Existential and possessive predications are analyzed as inverse copular sentences (Moro, 1997) as opposed to the canonical copular/locative sentences. The unified structure accounts for the agreement facts, such as partial vs. full agreement in existential and copular/locative predications, respectively.

The data investigated here will contribute to Arabic comparative and historical linguistics. More Arabic dialects’ data is needed to determine their stages in the Negative Existential Cycle.