The research presented in this dissertation adopts an empirical Saussurean structuralist approach to elucidating the true meaning of the verb patterns characterised formally by vowel lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbal system as a whole is examined in order t…
This thesis investigates the verbal morphology of Lachirioag Zapotec, a Northern Zapotec language from the town of San Cristóbal Lachirioag in Oaxaca, Mexico. There are two parts of the verbal morphology that are the focus of this thesis, the TAM prefixes and the argument enclit…
Yorùbá, has, for the most part, been analyzed by earlier grammarians from the perspective of English, thus leading to an English-oriented analysis of the language. This study presents a strictly aspect-based analysis of Yorùbá and its application to Tùtúolá's work and Nigerian E…
The Biblical Hebrew verbal system has long puzzled scholars. The Suffix Form (or Perfect) is supposed to mean "past" or "completed," while the Prefix Form (or Imperfect) is supposed to mean "future" or "incompleted," that is, present, future, or habitual. But when the conjunctio…
Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of ov…
In this thesis, I investigate the clause structure of Pulaar, an Atlantic language spoken in Senegal. Specifically, I look at the ordering of functional heads under the hypothesis on the Hierarchy of Functional Heads in Cinque (1999). I also look at the derivation of these funct…
Previous research on finiteness has been dominated by the studies in tensed languages, e.g. English. Consequently, finiteness has been identified with tense. The traditional definition influences the morphological, semantic, and syntactic characterization of finiteness which has…
The present investigation is a cross-sectional quantitative study of the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by Moroccan children in Catalonia. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narrative…
This dissertation analyzes two derived Biblical Hebrew verbal forms, the Niphal and the Hitpael. Present scholarship on Biblical Hebrew does not agree on the definition or relationship of these two stems. In chapter 1 I outline the two major problems for the Niphal and Hitpael: …
This dissertation investigates the verbal system of Persian and is focused on the interaction of modality, tense, aspect and negation in this language. The dissertation challenges the idea that the syntactic structure maps on to the semantic interpretation or vice-versa. It is a…