Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on…

The reconstruction of genealogical relationships between languages is traditionally performed through lexical comparison and the establishment of regular sound changes. The historical analysis of other aspects of linguistic structure, like syntactic patterns or the function of grammatical elements, is normally understood to depend on a previously…

Jeni Yamada's "Laura" and Michael Tomasello's "First Verbs" continue a tradition of providing useful information on the language ability of individuals in a depth rarely found in multisubject studies; however, these efforts are unusual for case studies in that both take strong theoretical positions on the essence of language and language learning.…