In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that…

Semantic and paradigmatic analyses are employed to show that deixis of the lexical content is the differentiating factor between pre- and post-position of the attributive adjective in French. The nature of modification in general is also discussed. (DB)