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Now showing items 11-20 of 22
Acting from character : how virtue and vice explain praise and blame
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
This dissertation offers a theory of praise and blame: praiseworthy acts manifest virtue and blameworthy acts are incompatible with virtue. Despite its simplicity, proposals like mine have been largely ignored. After all, ...
Implicatures in the DP domain
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
In this thesis, I investigate a set of apparently disparate phenomena that relate, more or less closely, to the interpretation of Determiner Phrases (DPs): the restrictiveness effects associated with NP modification, the ...
Movement out of focus
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014)
This dissertation investigates the consequences of overt and covert movement on association with focus. The interpretation of focus-sensitive operators such as only and even depends on the presence of a focused constituent ...
An inflexible semantics for cross-categorial operators
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
This thesis studies operators such as and and only, which occur in a broad range of environments. And, for instance, appears between sentences, intransitive verbs, quantifiers, and so forth. One line of analysis assigns ...
Constraints on the distribution of nasal-stop sequences : an argument for contrast
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
It has been argued that certain typological generalizations regarding the distribution of nasal-stop sequences can be explained by explicitly referencing contrast (e.g. Herbert 1977, 1986; Jones 2000). This thesis explores ...
Issues in objectivity and mind-dependence
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
Reality and objectivity are often characterized in terms of independence from the mind: the first-pass idea is that what it takes for any particular subject matter to be real and objective is for facts about it to obtain ...
The role of perceptual similarity and gradient phonotactic well-formedness in loan gemination processes/
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
Loan gemination is a cross-linguistically widespread phenomenon: short consonants preceded by short stressed vowels in the source language are borrowed as long in loanwords. It is generally considered to be an 'unnecessary' ...
Evidence and choice
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017)
This dissertation defends causal decision theory and argues against its main rival, evidential decision theory. In Chapter 1, I introduce a decision problem in which evidentialists end up predictably worse off, on average, ...
Precisifying art pluralism
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
This dissertation explores the legitimacy of art pluralism-the thesis that there are multiple, valid accounts of art. In 2011 Mag Uidhir and Magnus introduced the idea of art pluralism to revive the debate over the definition ...
A theory of consonant cluster perception and vowel epenthesis
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016)
This dissertation concerns cluster-dependent asymmetries in vowel epenthesis in loanword adaptation and in non-native cluster perception. The central argument is that auditory factors affect the relative perceptual similarity ...