This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

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 thesis investigates the implications of binding phenomena for the development of a reductionist theory of grammatical dependencies. The starting point is the analysis of binding and control in Hornstein (2001, 2009). A number of revisions are made to this framework in order to develop a simpler and empirically more successful account of…

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,…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

This paper focuses on the temporal and modal meanings associated with root infinitives (RIs) and other non-finite clauses in several typologically diverse languages--English, Russian, Greek and Dutch. I discuss the role that event structure, aspect, and modality play in the interpretation of these clauses. The basic hypothesis is that in the…

Discusses allomorphic relationships, easily stated phonologically, but obscured when not stated as morpholexical rules. Rules belonging to the phonological component sometimes must be regarded as lexical redundancy rules that capture generalizations about morphological selection. (CB)

The aim of this article is two-fold: to test the Aspect Hypothesis, according to which the early use of tense-aspect morphology patterns by semantic/aspectual features of verbs, and Tense is initially defective (e.g. Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Bloom et al., 1980; Andersen and Shirai, 1994; 1996; Robison, 1995; Shirai and Andersen, 1995;…

In this paper the morphological argument for the conditioning of Sanskrit aspiration and deaspiration is renewed in theoretically current terms, bringing forth new arguments and examining previously undiscussed major weaknesses in the purely phonological (autosegmental) argument. Relevant phonological, morphological, and lexical facts are…

A TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF MODERN FRENCH GRAMMAR IS SIMILAR TO THE "RULE OF CACAPHONY" PROPOSED BY PORT-ROYAL GRAMMARIANS TO AVOID BAD PRONUNCIATION. BY MEANS OF CERTAIN REWRITE RULES, THE CORRECT USAGE OF THE PARTITIVE (DE) CAN BE TAUGHT AND EXPLAINED MORE SIMPLY THAN WAS POSSIBLE USING THE TRADITIONAL METHOD. THE RULE OF CACAPHONY…

The analysis predicts the distribution of cleft-like sentence types whose introducing particle is "this" or "that" rather than "it," and asserts a correlation between judgements of grammaticality of pseudo clefts and sentences containing free relatives. (Author/NCR)

This paper discusses the term "language universal" and posits a definition of a "counter-universal." It is proposed that the voiced aspirates of Bario Kelabit represent an exception to a posited phonological behavioral universal and are an important addition to the inventory of possible phonetic segments. (AM)