Clausal embedding in Washo: Complementation vs. modification

Varieties of Clausal Complementation

This thesis argues that clausal arguments of mental-state predicates divide into two main types: those that express the content, or "subject matter" of the mental state, and those that express the cause of the mental state. My central theoretical claim is that this dichotomy corresponds to a difference in syntactic structure. I propose that these different structures derive from an operation of...

Clausal Complementation and Selection

Quantity, stress and reduplication in Washo*

Plural internal reduplication in Washo has generated much interest in the phonological literature. This study presents a novel analysis that unifies the treatment of a set of seemingly disparate aspects of this plural reduplication pattern (e.g. variation in the placement and size of the reduplicant, contrastive vowel length in stressed syllables, post-tonic gemination, and vowel-length inherit...

The phonetics of quantity alternation in Washo

Stress-sensitive quantity alternation is commonplace in the Uralic languages and many of the Germanic languages in and around the Scandinavia region, but few reports have detailed similar types of alternation in Native American languages. This study offers a quantitative analysis of the complementary length alternation between tonic vowels and post-tonic consonants in two generations of speaker...

Embedding Quantum into Classical: Contextualization vs Conditionalization

We compare two approaches to embedding joint distributions of random variables recorded under different conditions (such as spins of entangled particles for different settings) into the framework of classical, Kolmogorovian probability theory. In the contextualization approach each random variable is "automatically" labeled by all conditions under which it is recorded, and the random variables ...