Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

This paper, based on Rosenbaum's (1967) grammar of adult English, attempts to apply ideas of deep structure and transformations to child grammar. The main rules predicated include phrase structure rules, segment structure rules, contextual features, and transformational rules. In this approach, the role of transformations is to segment and place…

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses…

It is possible to construct a case for the child's interpretation of "of" in "must of been" as the preposition "of" in the process of language acquisition. Assuming the familiar concept that linguists should construct the simplest analysis compatible with a phenomenon, it is suggested that some children construct a…

These reports deal with language as a whole: its nature, its history, its relationship to culture, its acquisition, the immediate uses to which it can be put, and the development in students of an appreciation for the ability to use a foreign language. The book is divided into three main sections: Acquisition, Application, and Appreciation. For…

Evaluates two developmental models incorporating innovations in prosodic theory using the phonological forms of one child's vocabulary documented for the first nine months of language production. Results indicate the relevance of the prosodic hierarchy in the early grammar as well as considerable early knowledge of prosodic structure below the…

A microgenetic approach to studying grammatical morpheme learning uses longitudinal data from two children learning English in different ways. Eight general attributes of morphological systems are proposed that will promote or inhibit the emergence of filler syllables during development. (Contains 86 references.) (Author/LB)

Presents an approach to face-to-face interaction grammar that aims to discover rules of interaction that interlocutors share and suggests that this approach is common to conversational analysis and context analysis. Case studies are presented of interaction structure in parent-child routines during the child's first year. (58 references) (CK)

Examined the development of principles of control in the grammar of 15 preschool children over a 9-month period, focusing on pronominal reference. The results confirm a developmental sequence that is driven by lexical learning and changing structural analyses. (38 references) (MDM)

Addresses phenomena exhibited by young children such as suffixed and free articles, double definiteness, genitives, pronouns, and "nominal style." Shows that analysis of these early data must invoke at least one functional projection above the noun phrase. Findings argue against any claim about the universal absence of functional…

Preschoolers' ability to understand grammatical relations in passives and to generalize was studied using animate referents. Three- to five-year-old children were taught to produce passive sentence descriptions of events in which animacy of the actor and acted-on object were varied. After pretesting to determine passive sentence comprehension, the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) conditional constructions in modern English; (2) phonological and phonetic effects of nasalization on vowel height; (3) neural coding of pitch; (4) the…

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…

Papers on a variety of linguistic topics include six papers from a Festschrift and nine others, as follows: "Attitudes Towards English as a Possible Lingua Franca in Switzerland" (Urs Durmuller); "Functional Stability and Structural Levelling of Dialects: The Case of Maastricht" (Anton M. Hagen, Henk Munstermann); "On the…