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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Chiasmus: a phenomenon of language, body and perception
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-26)The term chiasmus and all its many variants describe a phenomenon of language, body and perception. As a syntactic-rhetorical device, the usage of which is culturally diffuse, chiasmus involves a re-ordering of elements ... -
Cultural evolution of scalar categorization: how cognition and communication affect the structure of categories on scalar conceptual domains
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-26)Concepts can be thought of as regions of geometrically structured conceptual domains. Of all such possible regions, only very few are lexicalized, i.e. expressed by natural language in a morphologically simple fashion. ... -
Theory of mind and language evolution: an exploration of rapid and involuntary perspective-taking
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-26)Current research on language evolution has provided considerable insight into the emergence of linguistic structure, but much of this research does not account for how language users access speaker meanings to build mappings ... -
Anatomy of dialogue in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-26)Research on medical teams constantly recognise the crucial value of communication. Studies on various medical teams, such as surgery and trauma, provide evidence for how communication either affects or is affected by a ... -
It's all about the interaction: listener responses as a discourse-organisational variable
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-06-26)Language is humanity’s key tool for communication. This entails the fact that it generally occurs in interaction between two or more individuals. However, we do not yet have a theory of language variation and change that ... -
Reference problem and how children use gesture and grammatical number to solve it
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis examines 2- and 3-year-olds’ understanding of social cues (specifically body orientation and pointing) and grammatical cues (specifically number marking) to reference in a series of three experiments using ... -
Language in and out of society: converging critiques of the Labovian paradigm
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)In this thesis, I discuss, from a metatheoretical perspective, how variationist sociolinguistics seems to be undergoing a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense. Roughly around the turn of the millennium, sociolinguists ... -
Syntax and morphology of English -ing
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis discusses the syntax and morphology of English -ing forms and draws a categorial distinction between gerunds and present participles. In English, the suffix -ing can attach to almost any verb, except modal ... -
Cross-linguistic investigation of the way-construction in English, Dutch, and German
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-29)This thesis presents a large-scale corpus investigation into the way-construction (found in sentences such as Peter made his way to the front door) in English, Dutch, and German in a Construction Grammar framework. A ... -
Effects of biliteracies on bilingual cognitive functions
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)Although previous research has examined the effects of bilingualism on cognitive functions, specific biliteracy effects have not been investigated. This thesis looks at the effects of script on three major components of ... -
Deriving null functional heads: a study on variation of functional structure
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)The aim of this dissertation is to develop a framework of functional structure that ensures that the representation of any phrase is only as large as necessary to capture the syntactic relations relevant to it. I argue ... -
Co-evolution of language and mindreading: a computational exploration
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)Language relies on mindreading: in order to use it successfully we need to be able to entertain and recognise communicative intentions. Mindreading abilities in turn profit from language, as language provides a means for ... -
Feature specifications and contrast in vowel harmony: the orthography and phonology of Old Norwegian height harmony
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)In this thesis, I provide a new approach to the role of phonological patterning in determining the featural content of phonological relations and the size and shape of sound inventories. The empirical scope of this project ... -
Vowel production in infant-directed speech: an assessment of hyperarticulation and distributional learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)This thesis considers two related research questions that are relevant to vowel production in infant-directed speech (IDS). The first of these research questions determines the extent to which caregivers intentionally clarify ... -
Induction and interaction in the evolution of language and conceptual structure
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)Languages evolve in response to various pressures, and this thesis adopts the view that two pressures are especially important. Firstly, the process of learning a language functions as a pressure for greater simplicity ... -
Language change in bilingual returnee children: mutual effects of bilingual experience and cognition
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)In this thesis, I focus on the linguistic changes that occur within bilingual returnee children; that is, children who were immersed in a second language (L2) dominant environment and returned to their first language ... -
Questions, biases and ‘negation’: evidence from Scots varieties
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-02)In recent years, there has been considerable linguistic interest in ‘non-canonical questions’ (Dayal 2016). These constructions express some quantity of interrogative meaning, as well as some additional bias, or some ... -
Statistical model of human lexical category disambiguation
(The University of Edinburgh, 1998)Research in Sentence Processing is concerned with discovering the mechanism by which linguistic utterances are mapped onto meaningful representations within the human mind. Models of the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism ... -
Generating intelligent tutoring systems for teaching reading: combining phonological awareness and thematic approaches
(The University of Edinburgh, 2000)The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of computers with artificial intelligence methods for the teaching of basic literacy skills to be applied eventually to the teaching of illiterate adults in Brazil. -
Formalisation and evaluation of focus theories for requirements elicitation dialogues in natural language
(The University of Edinburgh, 2000)Requirements engineering is an important part of software engineering. It consists in defining the needs of users when building a new system. These needs may be functional, i.e., what service should the system be able ...
