The constraints in English on the definiteness, specificity, humaness and animacy of noun phrases (NP's) undergoing passive and dative movement are examined. Evidence presented shows that these constraints occur in other languages in marked and unmarked constructions as absolute constraints on acceptability or as tendencies. This suggests a…

Argues that the explanation of the use of "ser" and "estar" with locatives presented in the March 1984 issue of "Hispania" derives so directly from a theory of universal grammar because it is indicative of the explanatory adequacy of Case Grammar or of other, comparable theories of the deeper levels of linguistic structure. (SED)

An analytic sketch of motion/location in more primitive spatio-temporal terms is presented. The earlier account (ED 096 825), showing various languages' most characteristic pattern for deriving a putatively-universal underlying representation of motion and location, is continued. The English pattern is characterized further (amplified by data from…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of coordination reduction in various languages and to propose a universal set of rules that will account for all types of coordination reduction. In a brief discussion of some of the more recent proposals on coordination reduction it will be shown that these proposals fail to account for the…

Papers dealing with syntactic evidence in various languages for a higher performative sentence containing information about speaker, addressee and the speech act involved are reviewed and discussed. Arguments for this analysis have the form of showing that overt sentences behave in some way as if they were subordinate to a higher sentence…

Supports the claim that aspect in English and written Arabic is a function of a variety of sentential elements including verb form, verb class, and adverbials. The two languages are basically similar in regard to two universal aspectual distinctions: syntactic categories and semantic categories. (TR)

This paper is an attempt to summarize as explicitly as possible certain empirical findings of classical biosystematics and modern semantic ethnography which may be considered to represent formal universals of human mental structure. The paper offers a formal treatment of the subject of taxonomy, and an application of the formalism to several…

This paper argues that the hypothesis that all languages have a definitization process is empirically refutable, and that use of the terminology "definite" and "indefinite" is justified in that it reflects intuitions of grammarians and linguists. The following statements are tested against evidence from samples of different languages: (1) all noun…

In the past, linguistic descriptions of the relationships common to passive sentences have not been universally applicable. Junction grammar, a type of generative grammar, is a model that may provide a means of describing universal passive relationships. Junction grammar differs from transformational grammar in that its rules (1) claim other…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…