Linguistics and English Language PhD thesis collection
This is a selection of some of the more recent theses from the department of Linguistics and English Language.
The material in this collection must be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. These theses are protected under full copyright law. You may download it for your own personal use only.
Recent Submissions
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Choosing to presuppose: strategic uses of presupposition triggers
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-15)This PhD project investigates the discourse structuring and managing properties of presupposition triggers. Specifically, the thesis is a theoretical and experimental investigation of what motivates speakers to presuppose ... -
Mechanisms underlying pre-school children’s syntactic, morphophonological and referential processing during language production
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-10-17)Much work has focused on how children learn the words and grammar of their language, with the emphasis being on how children learn to understand their native language. Little work has actually considered how children learn ... -
Imagining iconicity in the field and in the lab: experimental work on subjective aspects of iconicity in two artificial languages and an emerging sign language
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-30)[No Deposit Agreement] -
Development and processing of non-canonical word orders in Mandarin-speaking children
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-06)BACKGROUND: Cross-linguistically, syntactic structures bearing a word order different than the basic (canonical) word order in the specific language, i.e., non-canonical structures, have been shown to be more difficult ... -
Role of transparency in the acquisition of inflectional morphology: experimental studies testing exponence type using artificial language learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-08-09)Agglutinating morphology has often been described as easier to learn than fusional morphology, in large part because it is more transparent (e.g., Brown, 1976; Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001; Igartua, 2015). Such claims ... -
Disability and sociophonetic variation among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers of Taiwan Mandarin
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-16)Variationist sociolinguistics has not paid much attention to linguistically pathologised groups. This thesis studies pathologised speech from a third-wave variationist perspective, exploring how oral deaf or hard-of-hearing ... -
Structural priming in the grammatical network: A study of English argument structure constructions
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-14)Recent cognitive-linguistic approaches view grammar as a mental network of stored knowledge. The present study investigates to what extent psycholinguistic evidence from structural priming can inform one of the crucial ... -
How language adapts to the environment: an evolutionary, experimental approach
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)The aim of this thesis is to investigate experimentally whether cross-linguistic variation in the structure of languages can be motivated by their external environment. It has been suggested that variation does not only ... -
Predictive structure and the learnability of inflectional paradigms: investigating whether low i-complexity benefits human learners and neural networks
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-11-26)Research on cross-linguistic differences in morphological paradigms reveals a wide range of variation on many dimensions, including the number of categories expressed, the number of unique forms, and the number of inflectional ... -
Comprehension of grammatical gender, case and wh-questions in Greek heritage children
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)Over the past twenty years, one of the most debated questions in bilingual acquisition is how heritage language speakers acquire their heritage language. In this thesis, we address how Greek heritage children acquire their ... -
H-deletion and H-insertion in Nigerian Englishes: their sociolinguistic and extralinguistic constraints and their enregisterment as the ‘H-factor’
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)Sociolinguistic studies in terms of variation and enregisterment abound for native speakers’ realisations of shibboleths like h-deletion and h-insertion (e.g., Mugglestone, 1995; Britain, 2002; Lopez, 2007; Ramisch, ... -
Modal and discourse properties of utterance-final particles in Mandarin
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)Utterance-final particles (UFPs) are function words that are frequently used in everyday conversation. Unfortunately, as a category, they are difficult to characterise due to their notoriously ambiguous nature and lack of ... -
What do disyllabic words tell us about syllable structure, vowel quality, and stress in English?
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)This thesis explores syllable structure, vowel quality, and stress in English in the light of disyllabic words. Disyllabic words tell us much about these phenomena. Despite the huge literature on syllable structure, ... -
Facebook dialect: orthographical standardisation in Romanised Lebanese-Arabic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)With the advent of the internet, the new communicative opportunities afforded to millions of its users across the globe have not always come without drawbacks– and in some cases, unexpected advantages. For speakers of ... -
What to talk about, and how: studies on prominence and patterns of coreference
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)The concept of prominence has been variously defined, and it overlaps with other ideas in both theoretical and cognitive linguistics, such as activation, emphasis, or accessibility. Moreover, prominence has an important ... -
Referent properties and word order in emerging communication systems
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Why do languages look the way they do? This question lies at the core of much of linguistics research, and answering it can shine a light on the relationship between individual cognitive preferences and linguistic ... -
Competition, selection and communicative need in language change: an investigation using corpora, computational modelling and experimentation
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Constant change is one of the few truly universal cross-linguistic properties of living languages. In this thesis I focus on lexical change, and ask why the introduction and spread of some words leads to competition and ... -
ye saidꝭ lettreʒ: the orthographic representation of inflectional morphemes in Older Scots
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)The general tendencies characterising Older Scots (OSc) inflectional morphology and differentiating it from that of Middle English (ME) have been described (Minkova 1991; King 1997; Aitken 1977; Aitken and Macafee 2002; ... -
Not this, but that.' Exploring disambiguation in the context of multilingual word learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)Growing up and living with more than one language modulates new language learning in a variety of ways. Similarities and differences to monolinguals with regards to languages learning in all its aspects were found. ... -
Control in free adjuncts: the 'dangling modifier' in English
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)In this dissertation, I present an account of the control of free adjuncts that relies on incremental processing. While many free adjuncts are controlled by the subject of the matrix clause (1a), this is not always the ...
