This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR…

This is a study of processes of structural and functional diversification of the uses of three cognate verbs across the Indo-Iranian language family: "do/make", "be/become", and "give". First, this study identifies over sixty distinct construction types in which these verbs are used, including complex predicate…

The so-called compound use of ki 'im has been interpreted mainly either with exceptive ("except" or "unless") or adversative meaning ("but" or "rather"), although it has sometimes also been interpreted in other ways such as "only" or "surely". These various meanings have been applied…

The basic questions that a scholar interested in the study of language asks are concerned with language structure, acquisition, and change. William Labov is a linguist who has deeply influenced the linguistic scene in the past 60 years. It is to Labov's credit that he showed, backed by solid evidence, that the questions concerning language change,…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

The proceedings of a 1992 French conference on the structuralist approach of linguist Lucien Tesniere are reviewed, focusing on the recent evolution of this approach in French linguistics. Topics discussed include the origins of Tesniere's theory, his model of dependency, flat phrastic structure, fusion of the lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic…

This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data…

Reports an experiment intended to assess the psychological reality of the underlying clauses in "resultative constructions" in English. (RM)

Reports research at the University of Saskatchewan in which experiments with variously rearranged English and French sentences showed grammatical acceptability decreasing as the disruption of the sentence producing field of subject, verb, object, qualifier increased. (RM)

Special issue devoted to the study of generative grammar in German-speaking countries. (VM)

Presents results of a study of the phonological, morphological, and syntactical oral language patterns of disadvantaged children of New Orleans. Many of the findings are relevant to beginning reading instruction. (TO)

The results of this study argue . . . for a gradation within (basal reading) texts of sentence patterns and of elements used to fill the slots in those patterns"; based on author's doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1968. (Editor/RD)

The problem of determining the nature of this special form-class is seen in historical, linguistic perspective. A syntactic definition of predicatives as a word class with five types of morphological variation is included. The establishment of a word class or subclass on such a syntactic basis is suggested. (RL)

To explore some of the ways in which notions of grammaticality reflected in secondary English language textbook series affect a student's acquisition of standard English and his attitude toward language, (1) statements which authors of widely-used textbooks made about standard English and why it is taught in the schools were compared with comments…

This is Part 1 of the first of three volumes presenting a structural description of Russian dialects. This book deals with the phonological patterns of the dialects and analyzes in detail the vocalic and consonantal systems, discussing distribution, environmental influences, prosodic features, and variations among the dialects. The description is…