Matching Items (12)
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- All Subjects: Syntax
- Creators: Gelderen, Elly van
Description
This study explores the acquisition of the determiner phrase (DP) in monolingual (L1) and bilingual (2L1) French. I investigate the acquisition of DP structures and features in the speech of two monolingual French and two bilingual French-English subjects from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) corpus. I perform a thorough, longitudinal examination of the children's data, from the ages of 1;10 to 4;00, focusing on the description and analysis of their development of DP elements, words, and structures such as the definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, and numerals, as well as the DP features of gender, number, and definiteness. I also consider the Adjective Phrase (AP) and its interaction with the DP.
This study complicates the traditional view of discrete, simplified stages of DP acquisition, arguing instead for an ongoing and complex process. Application of the Minimalist model of syntactic analysis provides essential insights into the underlying processes of child grammar, and suggests a number of previously unaddressed characteristics and patterns in French DP development.
This study complicates the traditional view of discrete, simplified stages of DP acquisition, arguing instead for an ongoing and complex process. Application of the Minimalist model of syntactic analysis provides essential insights into the underlying processes of child grammar, and suggests a number of previously unaddressed characteristics and patterns in French DP development.
ContributorsDanton, Naomi (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Renaud, Claire (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This thesis investigates the pronominal system in Standard Arabic. It seeks to unravel the correlation between independent and dependent personal pronouns. Although both pronoun groups are treated as distinct parts of the lexicon, I argue that dependent pronouns are reduced forms derived from the strong counterparts. This study examines how these forms (reduced and non-reduced) relate to one another phonologically and syntactically. Various analytical tools are utilized including vowel harmony, syllable structure as well as some principles of Distributed Morphology and Chomsky's 1995 Minimalist Program. With regard to the phonological relations, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are generated from their parallel strong forms by omitting the initial syllable. Dependent object pronouns are formed by omitting the first two syllables. The first person singular and third person plural masculine subject pronouns are suppletive forms completing the paradigm. They are not derived by reduction from their full counterparts. After investigating the distributional properties of both sets of pronouns, I propose a bipartite subcategorization of reduced pronominals into two subclasses: clitics and affixes. Clitics surface in positions in which strong pronouns cannot occur. As for affixes, they are used to mark verb-argument agreement. In light of these positions, I argue that dependent subject pronouns are always affixes while dependent object pronouns are always clitics. Clitics function as syntactically independent units which combine with hosts at the phonological phase as a result of their prosodic deficiency while affixes associate with hosts when features are valued during a sentence derivation.
ContributorsAlbuhayri, Salem (Author) / Gelderen, Elly van (Thesis advisor) / Adams, Karen (Committee member) / Major, Roy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013