This thesis provides a detailed description and analysis of the Mankiyali phonology, a hitherto undocumented and endangered language of northern Pakistan. The language is spoken by about 500 people in a remote mountainous area in the Mansehra district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan. The data contained herein is a result of first-hand fieldwork with native Mankiyali speakers between 2019 and 2021. Data collection methods include recordings of naturally occurring discourse (e.g., stories, poems, conversations) and elicitation sessions with native speaker consultants. Topics covered in the thesis include an account of Mankiyali's phonemic inventory, phonotactics, a description of some phonological processes, minimal word constraints, and word stress placement.

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act …

Over the last sixty years, overtly intertextual poems with titles such as “Poem Beginning with a Line by John Ashbery” and “Poem Ending with a Line by George W. Bush” have been appearing at an increasing rate in magazines and collections. These poems wed themselves to other texts and authors in distinct ways, inviting readers to engage with poems which are, themselves, in conversation with lines from elsewhere. These poems, which I refer to as “apprompted” poems, explicitly challenge readers to investigate the intertextual conversation, and in doing so, they adopt inherent risks. My thesis will chart the various effects these poems can have for readers and the consequences they may hold for the texts from which they borrow. Literary critics such as Harold Bloom and J. H. Miller have described the act of borrowing as competitive and parasitic—“agon” is Bloom’s term for what he sees as the oedipal anxiety of poets and poets’ texts to their antecedents, but an investigation of this emerging genre in terms of linguistic pragmatics shows that apprompted poems are performing a wider range of acts in relation to their predecessors. Unlike Bloom’s theory, which interprets the impulse of poetic creation through psychoanalysis, I employ …