The phraseology of precipitation as a weather phenomenon occupies an important part in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. Each phraseological fund encompasses rich imagery and specific cognitive characteristics. The objectives of this research were to discover the cognitive characteristics of rain, snow and hail based on their participation in…

A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when "everything is…

In this commentary, I suggest that it may be helpful to think about the formidable problem space that Westergaard's (2021) Linguistic Proximity Model seeks to address at the three levels of analysis that Marr (1982) famously proposed are needed to understand any complex cognitive system. I argue that at the computational level of analysis, where…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

This article investigates phenomena related to subject pronoun realization in the English interlanguage of Macedonian learners. Preliminary research indicates that learners tend to omit the subject pronoun in both referential and non-referential contexts. It can be presumed that such interlanguage features are due to crosslinguistic influence,…

Research on syllable weight in generative phonology has focused almost exclusively on systems in which weight is treated as an ordinal hierarchy of clearly delineated categories (e.g. light and heavy). As I discuss, canonical weight-sensitive phenomena in phonology, including quantitative meter and quantity-sensitive stress, can also treat weight…