The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

Analyzes functional linguistic variables (sentence beginnings, frequency of verb types, material between subject and verb, end-sentence cohesion patterns) in hard news and human interest stories in "The Houston Post." Results supported functional theories about word order. Proportions of verb types in news stories differed from those in…

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…