The National Center for Leadership in Intensive Intervention (NCLII), a consortium funded by the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), prepares special education leaders to become experts in research on intensive intervention for students with disabilities who have persistent and severe academic (e.g., reading and math) and behavioral…

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…

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…

Generative semantics is (or perhaps was) a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of George Lakoff, John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later McCawley. The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his students. The nature and genesis of…

How can public speaking instructors teach students how to be charismatic and confident speakers? The activity presented in this article suggests that instructors foster competent and charismatic presentational skills by having students channel the stylistic capabilities of an exceptional speaker. The activity requires students to take on the…

This study presents an overall review of the paradigms that contribute to the making and development of functional human linguistics and communication skills and the teaching of language.

About 10 years ago, Robert J. Connors's article "The Erasure of the Sentence" questioned the disappearance of writing style and examined the validity of some of the reasons given for its disappearance. Since that 2000 article, the study of style has undergone a kind of renaissance, with numerous books and articles on its uses in composition theory…

This rejoinder demonstrates that Lopez-Serena's [Lopez-Serena, A., 2009. "Intuition, acceptability and grammaticality: a reply to Riemer." "Language Sciences" 31, 634-648] critique of Riemer [Riemer, N., 2009. "Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics." "Language Sciences" 31, 612-633] is unfounded. LS's critique is…

Standard criticisms of unjustified grammaticality assignments in generative syntax are easily countered by reminders that grammaticality is a different notion from acceptability. In response, the criticisms are reformulated here in a way that interprets unjustified assignments as possible evidence of the predictive failure of current generative…

This paper reports progress in developing a computer model of language acquisition in the form of (1) a generative grammar that is (2) algorithmically learnable from realistic corpus data, (3) viable in its large-scale quantitative performance and (4) psychologically real. First, we describe new algorithmic methods for unsupervised learning of…

Riemer (2009) complains that a large number of sentences, despite appearing to be acceptable to many native speakers of English--including himself--are treated as ungrammatical in recent works that subscribe to the generative approach to (the English) language. In his opinion, this need not be considered "as evidence of an overly narrow…

The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call "analogy," a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on…

We introduce a computational theory of situated language understanding in which the meaning of words and utterances depends on the physical environment and the goals and plans of communication partners. According to the theory, concepts that ground linguistic meaning are neither internal nor external to language users, but instead span the…

Using computers to help students practice and learn grammatical constructions goes back to the earliest days of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). With the coming of the Internet age, CALL began to focus more heavily on the new capabilities of group connectivity and computer-mediated communication. More recently, a gathering consensus has…

This paper introduces the Government-Binding Theory of grammar and offers examples of the theory's use in areas of language development, child language disorders, and adult aphasia. Discussed are the levels of representation of Universal Grammar, subtheories that constrain the representations at each level, parameter setting, core grammar, and…