To become a native speaker, beyond obligatory rules, children need to learn systematic variation in the language, as it is present at all levels of language structure and is an integral part of linguistic knowledge. To give an example in English, speakers sometimes pronounce words ending in -ing with -in' (e.g., working vs. workin') depending on…

Some links between linguistic meanings and markers change systematically and cyclically in what are known as "grammaticalization paths." Although the empirical observations that give rise to these characterizations are cross-linguistically robust, the representations and cognitive processes that support these shifts are still not well…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

Anchored on Labov's notion that some linguistic features may exhibit variants among speakers of the same language within the same community as well as on Parker and Riley's language variation theory, this inquiry which employs a qualitative-content [manifest] analysis assumes that "Surigaonon" exhibits some linguistic variations hence…

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period…

This paper was mainly concerned with analyzing the processes of active participle formation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It also aimed to examine the Rural Palestinian Dialect (RPD) in order to reveal the derivation of the active participle in this dialect and to describe any patterns that might vary from MSA. The study was based on the…

Itoman, one of the varieties spoken in the southern part of Okinawa Island, exhibits several tone patterns. Although the tone patterns of Itoman were examined in previous studies (Nakasone ms., Hattori 1959, Oshiro 1963, and Hirayama et al. 1966), they ended at the descriptive level, and no phonological accounts for the surface tone patterns were…

The study examined the acquisition of two morphological procedures of noun pluralization in Palestinian Arabic: "Sound Feminine Plural" (SFP) and "Broken Plural" (BP). We tested if noun pluralization was affected by (1) the type of morphological procedure, (2) the degree of familiarity with the singular noun stem, and (3) the…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity,…

Presents evidence for the idea that when morphemes are borrowed from a socially dominant language into a pidgin, and extended in usage as in a creole, the major factor determining the direction of such extension is the linguistic background of the speakers of languages other than the dominant one. (Author/CLK)

This paper attempts to show that the theory of phonological rule reordering is not plausible, and that any argument which attempts to use reordering to refute the theory of intrinsic ordering is inadmissible. King's (1973) arguments against intrinsic ordering are based on the theory that two reordering rules operate in phonological processes.…

Spanish American plural formation is discussed in relation to attempts that have been made to write a set of phonological rules that would correctly predict the Spanish plural using a combination of phonological rules and word structure constraints. A brief synopsis is resented of why previous attempts to predict the plural are in error.…