Dissertations/Theses

The culmination of the PhD program of study is a doctoral dissertation, prepared with the guidance of a thesis advisor. The dissertation must demonstrate originality and ability for an independent investigation, and the results of the research must constitute a noteworthy contribution to knowledge in the field. The dissertation must exhibit mastery of the literature on the subject and familiarity with the sources, and must be well written.

A PhD candidate files a dissertation proposal form with the University of Minnesota Graduate School shortly after passing the preliminary oral examination.

Students defend their PhD thesis to an oral examination committee consisting of four members, including their advisor and two other members of the Linguistics Graduate Faculty, plus one member external to the Linguistics program. Three members of the final oral examination committee will serve as reviewers of the dissertation, including their thesis advisor, one other member of the linguistics graduate faculty, and one member from the field of the minor or the supporting program. More details on examination committees can be found on Onestop's site. Students must follow all Graduate School requirements for formatting their thesis.

PhD Dissertations

2021. Borui Zhang. Clausal Complementation in Nepal Bhasa
2021. Maria Heath. Tweeting Out Loud: Prosodic Orthography on Social Media
2019. Paul Tilleson. On Bipartite Negation
2016. Michael Sullivan. Relativization in Ojibwe
2014. Muhammad Abdurrahman. Sociophonetic Perception of African-American English in Minnesota
2014. Suzanne van Duym. Informativeness, Category Membership, and the Distribution of Adjectival Past Participles
2014. Mahmoud Sadrai. Cognitive Status and ra-Marked Referents of Nominal Expressions in Persian
2014. James Stevens. Control and Disposal of Demonstratives, with Electrophysiological Evidence from English and Japanese
2013. Hiroki Nomoto. Number in Classifier Languages
2012. Mamadou Bassene. Morphophonology of Jóola Eegimaa
2012. Kaitlin Johnson. Development of Scalar Implicatures and the Indefinite Article
2012. Kateryna Kent. Morphosyntactic Analysis of Surzhyk, a Russian-Ukranian mixed lect
2012. Dingcheng Li. Entity Relation Detection with Factorial Hidden Markov Models and Maximum Entropy Discriminant Latent Dirichlet Allocations
2012. Ellen Lucast. The Interaction of Structural and Inferential Elements in Characterizing Human Linguistic Communication
2012. Mark Wicklund. Use of Referring Expressions by Autistic Children in Spontaneous Conversations: Does Impaired Metarepresentational Ability Affect Reference Production?
2011. Paula Chesley. Linguistic, Cognitive, and Social Constraints on Lexical Entrenchment
2011. Eden Kaiser. Sociophonetics of Hmong American English in Minnesota
2011. Sarah Loss. Iron Range English Long-Distance Reflexives
2010. Sharon Gerlach. The Acquisition of Consonant Sequences: Harmony, Metathesis, and Deletion Patterns in Phonological Development
2010. Oksana Laleko. The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in Language Loss: Covert Restructuring of Aspect in Heritage Russian
2009. Khalfaoui Amel. A Cognitive Approach to Analyzing Demonstratives in Tunisian Arabic
2009. Michiko Buchanan. Ellipsis Involving Verbs in Japanese
2009. Linda Humnick. Pronouns in Kumyck Discourse: A Cognitive Perspective
2009. Brendan Fairbanks. Ojibwe Discourse Markers

MA Theses

2022. Ruyuan Wan. Riddikulus: Detection of Persuasion Techniques in Memes
2022. Aandeg Muldrew. Understanding the e- prefix in NW Ojibwe in terms of veridicality
2021. Chen Yang. Results, negation and 'understand' verbs in Mandarin Chinese: An aspectual analysis
2021. Zachary Lorang. Multiple Partitive as a Distinct Phenomenon: Evidence from Russian
2021. Vipasha Bansal. Condition C in White Hmong
2021. Brandon Kieffer. Glide Clusters in Kinyarwanda: An Optimality Theoretic Analysis
2021. Zoe Brown. Wh-imperatives in Southwestern Ojibwe
2020. Mskwaankwad Rice. The Preterit Mode and Counterfactuality in Ojibwe
2020. Ian White. The Argument Structure of Deverbal Nouns
2020. Mitchell Klein. Tag, You’re It! An Examination of Pre-Velar Raising in Minnesota English
2020. Nora Livesay. Ojibwe Passives and VoiceP
2019. Alexander Jarnow. Making Questions with Tone: Polar Question Formation in Kinyarwanda
2019. Samantha Hamilton. Prosodically-Driven Reduplication in Maori: An Analysis
2018. Mary Christensen. I Always Understood the Past to Exclude Speech Time: Event structure in past tense politeness
2018. Hye-Min Kang. Upper Sorbian Genitive Pronoun within Possessive Adjective Construction
2017. Anthoni Fortier. Split Ergativity in Newari
2017. Maria Heath. Interpretation of Non-standard Capitalization on Twitter
2017. Jesse Scheumann. Hebrew Voicing Assimilation
2016. Jonathon Coltz. Expressing dislike in focus groups on food
2016. Mark McKay. The MorphoSyntax of Bipartite Negation in Paraguayan Guaraní
2016. Yolanda Pushetonequa. Phonological Change in Meskwaki and Effects on Orthography
2016. Borui Zhang. Predictions of Entropy Reduction Theory on Chinese Relative Clauses
2015. Martha Abramson. Contrast Preservation and Enhancement in Mandarin Chinese
2015. Anna Farrell. Official Language Policy and the Linguistic Landscape of an Internationalizing University
2015. Wei Song. The Sentence-final de and the Post-verbal de in the shi...de construction in Mandarin
2015. Joshua St. George. Features of Language: A Study of Informative Features for Use in a Supervised Non-deterministic Transition-based Dependency Parser over the Latin Dependency Treebank
2014. Geoffrey Fischer. Local Constraint Implication in Phonological Opacity
2014. Emily Hanson. ‘We’ll take that as a compliment’ Changes in the use of bitch as gender-role enforcement
2014. Jeremy Orosz. Prosody, Semantics and Narrative Structure: Revis(it)ing Labov
2013. Paul Tilleson. Bipartite negation in Sgaw Karen
2013. Guillermo Carlos Alvarez. Creole Derivational Morphology
2013. Alexa Landazuri. Female Swearing Behavior and Usage of the F-word: A Study of Californian and Midwestern Young Adults
2013. Hannah Sande. Nouchi as a Distinct Language: The Morphological Evidence
2012. Michael Sullivan. Documentation and description of narrative styles between Minnesota and Wisconsin Ojibwe