This commentary discusses Westergaard's (2021) keynote article, which presents a comprehensive model of first language (L1), second language (L2), and third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary presents evidence from a previous study of L3 learners that provides support for Westergaard's property-by-property transfer proposal. The commentary…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

Presents a syntax of metophor, discussing a typology of metaphor, the relationship between literal sense and figurative sense, and the importance of a precise definition of metaphor. (AM)

Discusses the basic taxonomy of linguists, that is the differences between formalist and functionalist approaches, as suggested in a previous article, focusing on the implications of such a taxonomy. (JL)

Explores the hypothesis that speech acts cannot be located without bringing in knowledge beyond that of the textual referent itself. Points out that speech acts are made up of sentence context pairs through which one must search for a formal motion of context as a framing of speech activities. (FL)

Analysis of Chinese passive constructions indicates two types. The first is a verbal or syntactic passive because it is derived through a transformational rule. The second is a lexical passive that has certain properties in common with the predicate adjectives in both Chinese and English and is derived through the semantic function and in lexical…

The authors of a previous paper on aspects of generalized phrase structure grammar respond to criticism of that paper and clarify elements in the discussion. The original paper addressed the problem of expressing relevant generalizations about the order of complements that a lexical item subcategorizes for. (MSE)

Suggests structure based on two sets of principles for deriving meaning from data: Shannon's measure of entropy, which provides means of measuring amount of information in message; and Ranganathan's faceted classification scheme, which provides means of determining number of meaningful data. Syntax, meaning, and semantics of data are discussed.…

Describes the development of a software system, SIMPR (Structured Information Management: Processing and Retrieval), that will process documents by indexing them and classifying their subjects. Topics discussed include information storage and retrieval, file inversion techniques, modelling the user, natural language searching, automatic indexing,…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…