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 order of constituents in Finnish clauses having free word order is analyzed. It is proposed that these clauses are defined only in terms of their immediate constituency, and that the logically possible permutations of these constituents form another set of sequence constructions, which transcend individual clause types. Each sequence…

Locative inversion, one aspect of word order in English discourse in which the positions of verb and noun phrase are inverted (e.g., "in front of the house is a tree"), is examined. It is argued that inversions after deictic adverbs and those after non-deictic, locative constituents are related, both representing devices: (1) expressing point of…

Analysis of the basic and alternative word order patterns of spoken and written modern Breton confirms it as a consistent VSO (verb, subject, object) language, possessing the principal operator/operand features posited for such languages, rather than having predominantly SVO word order as some recent research has suggested. However, as most…

A study investigating favorable and unfavorable contexts for learning some word order rules in Swedish as a second language is reported. The rules examined are subject-verb inversion after a preposed non-subject in main clauses and the rules for placement of the negative particle. Subjects were 60 adult native speakers of Finnish, Polish, and…

This paper attempts to show the relationship between variable rules and more widely used psycholinguistic constructs such as amalgams and schemas, and to point out how variationists' methods can be useful in the study of language acquisition. The traditional rule, the rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs in English, is discussed as it…

An analysis of the structure of possessive-adjective phrases (e.g., "women's new suitcases, new women's suitcases") in English looks at some data that appear to conflict with the intuitive order of S-structure possessives preceding adjectives. A solution to this apparent anomaly is proposed: it is not the compounding of possessive-noun…

The purpose of this paper is to show that: (1) language universals have much to offer to students of contrastive linguistics, and (2) in order to make contrastive analysis more meaningful, one ought to go beyond cataloguing mere contrastive structure statements and capture underlying structural tendencies. Some characteristics of word order in…