Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

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…