Date of Award

2021-12-01

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Linguistics

Advisor(s)

Sabrina Mossman

Abstract

The C-t effect has been extensively researched with regards to its variability, however, matrix verbs have not generally been taken into account. The present study investigates whether verbs believe, doubt, know, realize, say and think differ in the strength of the C-t effect they induce— exploring syntactic analyses, epistemicity and grammaticalization to possibly identify what characteristics of verbs dictate the strength of the C-t effect. Subjects (n=44) were asked to complete 1 of 2 Grammaticality Judgement Tasks (GJT), which asked them to rate the grammaticality of items which included matched items with that involving both subject extractions, constructions without extractions, and extractions with the complementizer whether. The results demonstrated that verbs believe, say and think induced a stronger effect than was observed for know, realize, and doubt. Thus, the data supports the idea that the verbs with the most epistemic sense, induce a stronger effect with the least variability.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

40 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Haydee Martinez

Included in

Linguistics Commons

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