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Clause chaining, switch reference and coordination
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
In this thesis I ponder over a constellation of phenomena that revolve around switch reference and coordination, drawing mainly on their instantiation in Kisedje (Je, Brazil). I start by investigating Klsedje's case system. ...
Joint practical deliberation
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do. In this dissertation, I argue that several speech acts that we can use to alter our moral obligations - promises, offers, requests, demands, ...
Persons, imposters, and monsters
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This dissertation is about person features, their representation and interpretation in natural language. I will argue that there are several ways in which person features can be represented and interpreted. Most importantly, ...
Biased learning of phonological alternations
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013)
What is the initial state of the grammar when children begin to figure out patterns of phonological alternations? This thesis documents the developmental stages of children acquiring Korean verb and noun paradigms, and ...
Epistemic stability
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
I argue that knowledge and rational belief are subject to stability conditions. A belief that amounts to knowledge couldn't easily have been lost due to the impact of misleading evidence. A belief that is rational couldn't ...
On what language is
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020)
What is language? I defend the view that language is the practical capacity for partaking in communication with linguistic signs. To have a language just is to know how to communicate with it. I argue that this view -- ...
Intervention effects in German : a contiguity approach
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019)
This paper explores to what extent Richards' Contiguity Theory can insightfully be applied to so-called Intervention Effects in German, a set of phenomena which were originally described as constraining the syntax in an ...
Already : just scalarity
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020)
The particles still and already are commonly thought of and analyzed as particles that mirror each other. The particle still has been robustly argued to have an additive presupposition in the same vein as particles like ...
Interpreting questions under attitudes
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015)
Abstract This dissertation concerns three kinds of variability that pose challenges for the compositional semantics of question-embedding sentences: (i) lexical variation among clause-embedding predicates with respect to ...
Default ergative
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
In this thesis, I propose the hypothesis that ergative Case in certain languages may be assigned to a DP which would be otherwise Case-less within a certain domain. In this sense, ergative Case appears to be a default. At ...