Nonverbal Predication in Chukchi

Predication 1 Predication

Predication

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...

Resolving uncertainty in plural predication

Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.g., the boxes each are heavy vs. the boxes together are heavy). This paper investigates the role of context in the disambiguation of plural predication. We address the key phenomenon of "stubborn distributivity," whereby certain pre...

Secondary Predication in L2 Grammar

A persistent question in the SLA (second language acquisition) research concerns the status of the involvement of the native language (i.e. L1 transfer). Inquiry into the question has been made on the basis of a variety of linguistic frameworks, such as contrastive analysis (Lado, 1957), L2 (second language) generative parametric approach (Flynn, 1987; White, 1989; Schwartz, 1996), and the more...