Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

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…

The visual-manual modality of sign languages renders them a unique test case for language acquisition and processing theories. In this commentary the authors describe evidence from signed languages, and ask whether it is consistent with Ambridge's proposal. The evidence includes recent research on collocations in American Sign Language that reveal…

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,…

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…

Existential negation is the one type of negation present in languages, which its item is called "negative existential", and it provides to tell the case of "absence", "lack", "there is not", "poor", "empty", "dead" etc. Negative existentials are generally used for the common…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard's Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is…

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the…

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches…

Purpose: This article summarizes the shared principles and evidence underpinning methods employed in the three sentence-level (syntactic) grammatical intervention approaches developed by the authors. We discuss associated clinical resources and map a way forward for clinically useful research in this area. Method: We provide an overview of the…

When discussing about "plurality" of nouns in Turkish, it reminds /+lar/ affix after nouns (morpheme) and the subject is undervalued. Whereas, plurality and formation of plurality is not simple as it is thought as well as it is not made up of /+lar/ affix. It is because /+lar/ affix is only one of the linguistic elements in the…

Lexical knowledge is complex, multidimensional, and difficult to pin down to a set of defined components. The development, organization, and use of lexical knowledge in the first and additional languages are studied in a number of neighbouring disciplines beyond second language acquisition and applied linguistics, including psycholinguistics,…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a "Semantic Illusion": Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component--traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration--but instead produced a P600…