Despite the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) government's determination to implement the "mother tongue education" policy amid strong social resistance one year after the handover, English remains a prestigious language in society. The need for Putonghua (Mandarin/Standard Chinese) is also increasing following ever-expanding…

This study introduces a typological model of the "conceptual language-specific approach" to the L2 research on the acquisition of tense-aspect. The model is based on the typological notion of prominence, classifying languages into tense-prominent and aspect-prominent (Bhat 1999) and the L1 research proposal that language-specific…

Offers a new classification of the indirect question clause, as one of four categories of subordinate clauses, according to content, while retaining the three traditional form categories, namely, conjunctional, relative, and those introduced by "w-" interrogative words. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Basically a defense of Joseph Greenberg's classification of African Languages (1963), this article also discusses in non-technical terms and in reference to the African situation how linguists deal with language change and how language relationships are determined. (FB)

The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the "Structure-Building Model" and the "Continuity Hypothesis" within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain…

Kaki Ae is a non-Austronesian language spoken by about 300 people on the south coast of Papua New Guinea, at best distantly related to any other language in that area. A brief grammar sketch of the language is presented, including discussion of the phonology, sentences, phrases, words, and morpheme categories. Kaki Ae phonemics include 11…

Describes the surface structure of German adverbs proceeding from the standpoint of dependence-valence grammar. On the basis of their meaning, adverbs are classified as modal, temporal and locational. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A new morphological categorization of cardinal numbers in Russian is presented, based solely on synchronic morphological features. (RM)

Learnability theory is an attempt to illuminate the concept of learnability using a mathematical model of learning. Two models of learning of categorial grammars are examined here: the standard model, in which sentences presented to the learner are flat strings of words, and one in which sentences are presented in the form of functor-argument…

The contributions of Peter Stephen DuPonceau and John Pickering to American linguistics in the early nineteenth century are reviewed and discussed. Despite their probable status as amateurs in the study of American Indian languages and their very limited fieldwork, they made some significant contributions to the general field of language studies…

Addresses some of the problems concerning the hierarchical relationship between language typology and genetic linguistics and between typology and universal grammar. (RM)

Considers if American Ebonics is a different language from English or if it is a dialect of English. Discusses how American Ebonics relates to the larger Ebonics picture. Focuses on the grammatical patterns of Ebonics that diverge the most from standard English. Addresses pedagogical implications. (SC)

Across languages, clauses expressing possession, location, and existence exhibit many similarities. To capture their evident affinity, it is often claimed that possessives derive--synclironically or diaclironically--from expressions of location/existence. This localist account obscures a basic contrast between two broad classes of possessive…

Abstracts of 23 addresses given at the Sixteenth Annual Conference on Linguistics are presented in this report. The papers given at the conference deal with French, American English, English, Japanese, Cantonese, Latin, and Proto-Indo-European and cover a wide variety of topics, including dialectology, form classes, grammar, and semantics. The…