The article revisits the canonical (Dem>Num>A>N) and non-canonical (A>Dem>Num>N & Dem>A>Num>N) prenominal patterns in Mandarin Chinese, from the perspective of the Labeling Algorithm. It shows that the syntactic distribution of adjectives are different, depending on the attributive-predicative sources and the…

The use of social robots in education is a growing area of research and the potential future applications are various. However, the conversational models behind current social robots and chatbot systems often rely on rule-based and retrieval-based methods. This limits the social robot to predefined responses and topics, thus hindering it from…

This article has two main goals. The first is to summarize and comment on the current state of affairs of generative approaches to SLA (GenSLA), 35 years into its history. This discussion brings the readership of SSLA up to date on the questions driving GenSLA agendas and clears up misconceptions about what GenSLA does and does not endeavor to…

This article proposes a formal model of the human language faculty that accommodates the possibility of 'attrition' (modification or loss) of morphosyntactic properties in a first language. Modeling L1 grammatical attrition entails a quite fundamental paradox: if the structure of the language faculty in principle allows for attrition of…

I review the classic literature in generative grammar and Marr's three-level program for cognitive science to defend the Evaluation Metric as a psychological theory of language learning. Focusing on well-established facts of language variation, change, and use, I argue that optimal statistical principles embodied in Bayesian inference models are…

This paper analyzes "wh"-questions in the English Language based mainly on Chomsky's Minimalist Programme of transformational grammar as the theoretical model. The four main objectives of this paper are as follows: first, it undertakes a cross linguistic typological analysis of "wh"-questions and it then discusses the derivation of…

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It…

Speech and language therapist and teacher practitioners need particular knowledge to work effectively together to support the needs of individual learners. Using the frame of modes of knowledge (Gibbon, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzmann, Scott, and Trow, "The new production of knowledge", London, Sage Publications, 1994), the necessary…

Meta communication plays a key role in foreign language learning and teaching. Broadly speaking, meta communication is communication about communication. Meta communication is something that goes beyond communication and all language learners and teachers should be familiar with its existence. It should be stressed that meta communication which…

In vocabulary testing, whether to adopt context is a heat-debated topic. In the article, an experiment is designed to investigate what is the effect of zero context and sentence context on the vocabulary testing? And how do the different kinds of context in vocabulary affect the subjects' performance? The experimental result demonstrates that…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

Each language is a unique tool for analyzing and synthesizing the world, incorporating the knowledge and values of a speech community. According to Sapir (1931), linguistic "categories [including] number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, "aspect", and a host of others ... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon…

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of…

The notions of categorical selection (c-selection) and semantic selection (s-selection) as outlined in recent research on generative grammar are discussed. The first section addresses the type of selectional constraint imposed on English small clauses (e.g., "John considers [Mary smart]"). In the second section, it is suggested that the constraint…

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "While the man was visiting the children who were surprisingly pleasant and funny played outside." Participants produced more transitive sentences following such temporarily ambiguous sentences than following unambiguous sentences that were…