RECENT HONORS THESES

Joel Wallenberg: "A Story of the American 'self': a Case Study in Morphological Variation"
Winner of a 2003 Golden Medal

Cheryl Andrada: "English and Tagalog Kinship Terms in Ilocano"

Elizabeth Micks: "The Acquisition of Nonreferential it and Existential there"

Joy Geren: "Parental Cues in Word Learning: Deictic terms and locational questions"

Franzo Law: "Is it Justified to Absolutely Avoid Splitting an Infinitive? A Diachronic Analysis of the Split Infinitive"
Winner of a 2001 Golden Award.

The split infinitive construction has been the source of many debates and its grammaticality has been argued vehemently by many linguists and writers. Why did the split infinitive construction emerge? Has it changed since it was first discovered? My paper traces the development of this construction from the thirteenth century to present day English and discusses the opposing view-points to its acceptance as a standard English construction.

Helen Tsai: "Is tone sandhi in Taiwanese productive?"

Taiwanese is a tonal language in which syllables undergo systematic tone changes depending on the environments of the syllables. This phenomenon is known as tone sandhi. To native speakers of Taiwanese, these changes seem to come naturally without much thought, but is tone sandhi productive in Taiwanese? Would native speakers be able to take a word they have never heard before and produce tone sandhi changes in their output? This paper answers the questions by examining data collected from 57 native Taiwanese speakers.