The philosophical literature on modals is dominated by the following paradigm: modals are modeled as quantifiers over sets of possible worlds. The diversity of modal “fla- vors” (e.g., epistemic, deontic, teleological interpretations of modals) is accommodated within the paradigm by logical mechanisms that allow extralinguistic factors to restrict the quantificational...
In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
This dissertation examines the longue durée political history of Ateker-speaking agro-pastoralists in the semi-arid plains of today’s Uganda – Kenya – Ethiopia – South Sudan borderlands. Today’s Ateker-speaking communities include the Karimojong, Teso, Turkana, Toposa, Dodos, Jie, Nyangatom, and Jiye. Over the past millennium, Ateker-speaking communities developed a diversity of...
Ataxic dysarthria is a disorder affecting the naturalness of speech due to damage to the cerebellum, a neural structure critical for the timing, scaling, and sequencing of speech movements (Ackermann, Vogel, Petersen, & Poremba, 1992; Diener & Dichgans, 1992; Duffy, 2013; Rampello, Rampello, Patti, & Zappia, 2016). In healthy individuals,...
This dissertation examines the behavior of bare singular noun phrases, a set of English nominals showing no formal indication of either definiteness or mass/ count status. Although they appear to be count nouns, I show that these nominals represent maximal projections.
Successfully grappling with the widespread linguistic variation of daily life requires speakers to adapt to systematic variation in the environment while discarding incidental variation, based on their prior experience. In the case of phonotactics, speakers’ prior experience is that talkers who differ in their language background are likely to vary...
The analytical paradigm in philosophy has as a pillar an analysis of the sentence as a basic entity. New sentences may be built from old sentences recursively through the application of logical constants, recently including intensional operators. Models are built on how these logical constants interact with each other, and...
This dissertation focuses on the topic of pseudowords and how speakers pseudoword processing relates to that of real words. Three main lines of inquiry are pursued with respect to pseudowords and real words: mechanisms of gradient well-formedness, theories of morphological decomposition, and indexical associations for morphemes in complex words. It...
Both the timing (i.e., ‘when’) and amount (i.e., ‘how much’) of language exposure have been shown to affect language-learning outcomes. Monolinguals and (most) bilinguals confound these two factors of early exposure and extended exposure (i.e., their first-acquired language is their most used or dominant language), making it difficult to isolate...