Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

Purpose: Most children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have below-age lexical knowledge and lexical representation. Our goal is to examine ways in which difficulties with social communication and language processing that are often associated with ASD may constrain these children's abilities to learn new words and to explore whether minimizing…

Nearly half a century has passed since Philippine educator Teodoro Llamzon discovered the Remontado language, which would be introduced to the world in a master's thesis written by his student Pilar Santos. Although data from the wordlists they collected have been included in subsequent publications by several other authors, no one had revisited…

This paper consists of a short multimedia introduction to Lolak, a near-extinct Greater Central Philippine language traditionally spoken in three small communities on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. In addition to being one of the most underdocumented languages in the area, it is also spoken by one of the smallest native speaker populations…

This article offers commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue. It argues that more precise definitions are needed for the terms "rule," "simple," and "productive." Topics discussed include Amaral and Roeper's verb second (V2) rule,…

Amaral & Roeper's Multiple Grammars (MG) proposal offers an appealingly simple way of thinking about the linguistic representations of bilingual speakers. This article presents a commentary on the MG language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue, focusing on the theory's implications for child…

We show that 4-year-olds assign the correct interpretation to antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) sentences because they have the correct representation of these structures. This representation involves Quantifier Raising (QR) of a Quantificational Noun Phrase (QNP) that must move out of the site of the verb phrase in which it is contained to…

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition.…

Describes "need" as a semiauxiliary and marginal modal and as a full lexical verb in present-day British English from the syntactic, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic points of view. The descriptions given by grammars as well as examples in British-English texts are compared. (14 references) (Author/CFM)

Presents an interview with Noriko Akatsuka concerning her studies of the relationship between a speaker's state of mind and modality. Notes that the interviewee has concentrated on conditionals using data chiefly from Japanese, Korean, and English, with the primary goal of using conditional construction as a tool to investigate questions…

The aim of this paper is to describe verbal complementation in Malagasy and to consider how the Malagasy data reflect the "binding hierarchy" proposed by Givon (1980). It is shown that the Malagasy data provide support for the hierarchy and that the occurrence of the complementizer "fa" can be accounted for in terms of the strength of binding the…

Discusses prevailing ideas of how children learn language and addresses the argument of rules versus analogies in learning to form the past tense of verbs. Cites cases involving connectionist models. (ML)

This paper provides an overview of second language acquisition (SLA) research over the past several decades and highlights the ways in which it has retained its original applied and linguistic interests and enhanced them by addressing questions about acquisition processes. After discussing disciplinary contexts (SLA research and applied…

Describes a project to code complementation patterns of all verbs in the Collins COBUILD English language corpus, using simple notation based on words and word classes rather than traditional functional categories. This is the first pedagogic grammar to integrate syntax and lexis using corpus data. Explores the possibility of using a pattern…

A study of the uses of the French verb forms ending in "-ant" and the English forms ending in "-ing" begins with a discussion of the identification and classification of the various uses (substantive, adjectival, and adverbial) in each language and then compares them. The research finds that the English uses are far more varied…