The article, "morphosyntactic peculiarities of the speech of children with Down's syndrome", treats, important aspects of the study of two adjacent branches of linguistics, namely, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics-Language development of the child accompanied by speech disorders, on the other hand, those morphosyntactic features…

The purpose of this experiment was to determine if subjects who were unaware that a phrase has been deleted from a sentence could match the deleted phrase in both semantic content and syntactic position. Subjects were required to complete one of two blanks in a sentence with a prepositional phrase. Instructions stressed that these completions…

This paper argues that we are moving toward a more experimental approach to language, one which is characterized less by introspective judgments and more by empirical evidence. The first section of the paper is a general discussion of the directions linguistic theories are taking. The second section discusses some of the fundamental problems…

Two instances of unaccusative verb mismatches in Japanese are examined. An unaccusative mismatch is the situation in which a different accusative diagnostic singles out different classes of intransitive verbs within and across languages. One type of unaccusative mismatch has to do with group C verbs, or verbs of manner with protagonist control.…

The concept of grammatical servitude, defined as the absence of semantic choice in linguistic constructions, minimizes dependence on intuition and subjective judgment in syntactic analysis. It also causes the researcher to neglect important communicative resources of the speaker. To remedy this problem, the use of semantics in syntactic analysis…

The form of the print poetic line is partially determined by the expectations of the potential readers since authors, as participants in the common literary heritage of their culture, make use of the common expectations of that literary heritage. As a test of this hypothesis, one poem by James Dickey and one by Ted Olson were printed as prose, and…

An analysis of Kilega, a Bantu language spoken in eastern Zaire, focuses on the relative positions of subject and verb and agreement patterns, with particular attention to WH-movement. It is found that Kilega is a subject-verb-object language, but exhibits some variant patterns. WH-movement triggers verb-subject inversion and shifts agreement. The…

Recent proposals concerning the relationship between thematic structure and syntactic structure, including the idea of thematic hierarchy, when used with certain language-specific properties, offer insight into some problems concerning the Mandarin Chinese phrase structure condition (PSC). The PSC is such that the internal structure of XP contains…

The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inalienable possession (IP) in Romance languages hinges more on inferences than is commonly assumed. Most of the analysis concerns Spanish because that language provides the best evidence of how IP is non-grammatical in the sense that it is free of morpho-syntactic constraints. French and…

It is proposed here that second language learners can acquire a system of reflexive binding, both local and long-distance, that is different from that found in their native language, and individual subject data are offered to support this claim. First, some general properties of the syntactic behavior of reflexives and reflexive constructions are…

In a study about the comprehension of anaphoric relationships in text, three anaphoric ties in forward (antecedent-anaphor) and backward (anaphor-antecedent) position were examined with attention to developmental trends. A four-school sample was used, three in the United States and one in New Zealand. A test of comprehension of anaphoric…

The author of this paper argues that, in the study of current usage, we need to supplement data from corpus studies by using methods that elicit use, reports of use, and evaluations of use on items which interest them. Ten methods for experimental elicitation of such data are described, related to one another, and illustrated with examples of data…

The possibility is suggested that the meanings of words are abstracted far beyond the range of cognitive concept, and that the role words play in the meaning of sentences is similar to the role phonemes play in the meanings of words. The meanings of the various forms are classed into a single paradigm known as the verb "mot-u" which is one of the…

An exploratory study of quantitative measurement of syntactic and rhetorical fluency examined students' writing near the beginning and near the end of a two-quarter, freshman English program. The syntactic analysis focused on the clause, which was classified according to basic syntactic type and elaborating syntactic structures. The rhetorical…

The extent to which Basque displays ergative characteristics (an ergative language treats the underlying subject of intransitive clauses alike in some manner and differently from the underlying subject of transitive clauses) in its syntax is examined. The amount of evidence needed to conclude that Basque or any other language is ergative is…