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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Intervention, participation, perception: case studies of language activism in Catalonia, Norway & Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-08-14)This thesis brings together and contextualises three papers, each examining a case-study of language activism. The corresponding research project presents linguistic ethnographic and discourse analytical research in the ... -
Aspects of cross-variety Dinka tonal phonology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-07-27)This thesis examines tonal phonology across varieties of Dinka (West Nilotic, South Sudan), a typologically unusual language. The sound system—particularly the suprasegmentals—of Dinka is highly complex; the language has ... -
Attitudes and perceptions of Saudi students towards their non-native EMI instructors
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-07-10)This thesis examines undergraduate students’ attitudes toward non-native English speaker (NNES) instructors in an EMI context in Saudi Arabia. It also investigates their perceptions of the speech of those instructors, in ... -
Explanatory mixed methods approach to the effects of integrating apology strategies: evidence from Saudi Arabic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-20)Apology is a critical speech act in everyday language. It has attracted many researchers from different perspectives, apology realisations patterns, apologies in different cultures, apology competence among second language ... -
Multilingualism in later life: natural history & effects of language learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-21)The overarching aim of this thesis is to explore the question of what role the knowledge and use of multiple languages plays in ageing. To answer this question two approaches were taken: first a natural history perspective ... -
First language attrition in late bilingualism: lexical, syntactic and prosodic changes in English-Italian bilinguals
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-16)Among the most notable findings in recent bilingualism research is that the two languages are constantly active, thus giving rise to complex interactions, in the bilingual mind. One of the natural consequences of these ... -
Causation is non-eventive
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-14)This thesis presents a system developed to account for the observation that subverbal causation is present in stative structures, which requires a reanalysis of the subverbal primitives involved in causal structures (e. ... -
Developmental trajectory of grammatical gender: evidence from Arabic
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-18)There is a well-documented bias among children to disproportionately rely on morphophonological cues to determine noun gender classes (Culbertson et al., 2019; Gagliardi & Lidz , 2014; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Levy, 1983; ... -
Copular clauses in Malay: synchronic, diachronic, and typological perspectives
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-16)This thesis examines the copulas ialah and adalah in Malay on different levels of linguistic analysis, in different periods in time, and against different genetically related languages. Addressing the scarcity of research ... -
Sentence processing in first language attrition: the interplay of language, experience and cognitive load
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-22)In a bilingual mind, two languages frequently interact with each other during language comprehension and production. Both languages stay active, and bilingual speakers must resolve interferences from the unwanted language, ... -
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 ... -
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, ...
