We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

The present study aimed to catalogue and compare usage patterns of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in Modern Standard Arabic and English by native and learner writers. Building upon an analysis of a multi-genre monolingual Arabic corpus, use of both Arabic and English VPCs was explored in a bilingual L1 (first language) Arabic L2 (second…

We examine the characteristics of NDI (negative degree inversion) and its relation with other inversion phenomena such as SVI (subject-verb inversion) and SAI (subject-auxiliary inversion). The negative element in the NDI construction may be" not," a negative adverbial, or a negative verb. In this respect, NDI has similar licensing…

Most English adjectives can appear either prenominally or as predicates. (1) a. the red rose b. Roses are red. There are also adjectives that can appear only in one position or the other, but not in both: (2) a. * the awake child b. The child is awake. (3) a. the former president b. * The president is former. The primary goal of this dissertation…

This project investigates second language (L2) learners' processing of four types of Chinese relative clauses crossing extraction types and demonstrative-classifier (DCl) positions. Using a word order judgment task with a whole-sentence reading technique, the study also discusses how psycholinguistic theories bear explanatory power in L2 data. An…

This dissertation uses syntactic, semantic and morphological evidence from English nominalization to probe the interaction of event-structure and syntax, develop a typology of structural complexity within nominalization, and test hypotheses about the strict ordering of functional items. I focus on the widely assumed typology of nominalization…

The current paper attempts to account for the formation of English middle sentences. Discussing a set of previous analyses on the construction under investigation we show, following the assumptions of Oosten(1986) and Iwata(1999), that English middle constructions should be divided into two types: generic middle constructions and non-generic…

This paper is a very preliminary attempt to look at how languages encode information. Different languages use different linguistic devices. Indian languages encode information morphologically or lexically. This provides flexibility in their word order. English, on the other hand, uses position for encoding information which results in a relatively…

A structural priming experiment investigated whether grammatical encoding in production consists of one or two stages and whether oral bilingual language production is shared at the functional or positional level [Bock, J. K., Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), "Handbook of psycholinguistics"…

The article reports on a comparative study of the abilities of aphasic speakers and normal control subjects to comprehend and produce verbs and sentences. The analysis is based on test results obtained as part of the standardization procedure for a test battery originally developed for Dutch and since translated and adapted for English and…

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

The 'determiner' category was originally set up by structuralists for identifying nouns. The rewrite rule for 'determiners' in transformational generative grammar is inadequate for showing correspondences between type and token. An appraisal of quantity terms might eliminate the concept of the 'determiner,' and replace that category with one of…

What aspects of spatial relations influence speakers' choice of locative? This article presents a study of static spatial descriptions from 24 languages. The study reveals two kinds of spatial terms evident cross-linguistically: specific spatial terms and general spatial terms (GSTs). Whereas specific spatial terms--including English…

Constituent structure is considered to be the very foundation of linguistic competence and often considered to be innate, yet we show here that it is derivable from the domain-general processes of chunking and categorization. Using modern and diachronic corpus data, we show that the facts support a view of constituent structure as gradient (as…