American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

This paper takes issue with the view of conceptual structures as autonomous syntactic structures generated by syntactic formation rules. Instead, it adopts the position developed by Croft and Cruse (2004), in showing that linguistic knowledge -- knowledge of meaning and form -- is basically conceptual structure. In fact the, fundamental problem…

Singapore's language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore's society. In this article, we review Singapore's language policy, emphasizing the functional…

Because sign languages have two main articulators, signers simultaneously experience both possibilities and constraints in the articulation and perception of linguistic messages. Sign languages commonly convey different linguistic units with each hand, and additional information is conveyed in nonmanual signals. Meaningful perseverations (or sign…

Adjective- noun order errors are a common occurrence throughout all levels of English language students. Based on professional experiences, existing literature and revisiting what some may consider archaic methodologies, this reflective article aims to analyse adjective-noun order errors among Colombian learners of English, understand why it…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

In this paper, I examine the prosodic nature of unstressed function words in Spanish. I defend the hypothesis that these words, like all other words in the language, have a syllable that is lexically designated as stressed. I suggest that the essential property of these words is that they are subject to a rule of prosodic merger with following…

A framework is provided for the description and contrastive analysis of limited-domain syntactic choice in English and French. Using a corpus of naturally occurring English and French sets of instructional texts, the expressions available in each language for conveying the two procedural semantic relations of "generation" and "enablement" are…

Looks at two languages, one well known and the other less so, that have undergone changes in word order. Data for the two languages in question--English and Irish--are compared. Parallels in the internal mechanisms suggested for the attested word order changes in both Old English and Old Irish are examined critically. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the fact that the conditional mood has wider distribution in Czech than in Russian as far as its meaning and use are concerned. An analysis of this phenomenon is proposed that makes use of many aspects and dimensions such as the relation between two propositions in an "if...then" construction, the "alternative…

In a discussion of possessives in Spanish, it is shown that three morphosyntactic constructs are systematically linked. The possessive dative construction, inalienable possession and nonrestrictive adjectives, and inalienable possession with subjects are examined. (25 references) (LB)

Recent research into signed languages indicates that signs may share some properties with gesture, especially in the use of space in classifier constructions. A prediction of this proposal is that there will be similarities in the representation of motion events by sign-naive gesturers and by native signers of unrelated signed languages. This…

Evidence is presented that suggests a genetic relationship between the Klamath and Sahaptian languages. The current list of potential Klamath-Sahaptian cognates contains core lexical material sufficient to demonstrate the validity of a genetic relationship, although many details of sound correspondence have yet to be worked out. But it is not only…

A detailed analysis of nouns derived from Noun + Noun structures in the African language Yoruba is presented. These nouns are categorized into two types: compound and phrasal nouns. Assuming some of the basic principles of lexical phonology, it is argued that compound nouns should be derived in the lexicon, while phrasal nouns are derived in the…

Demonstrates the similarities between English and Farsi with respect to discourse-functional constraints on inversion. It is argued that this phenomenon is significant because these two languages exhibit different canonical word order and thus expectations can be raised from some functional-syntactic universals. (15 references) (Author/CK)