Linguistics and English Language PhD thesis collection: Recent submissions
Now showing items 1-20 of 549
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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 ... -
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 ...
