This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

The general goal of this dissertation is to explore two decades-long second language (L2) acquisition issues: whether and to what extent the L2 learner's first language (L1) and Universal Grammar (UG) respectively play a role in L2 development. Targeting English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) and "wh"-extraction out of VPE, four…

According to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English 1999 by Biber et al. (p. 266) generic article uses are more than twice as common in academic English than in conversation or fiction. This is an area that English for Academic Purpose (EPA) textbooks and teachers would need to target more than general English teaching. This paper is…

Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the "object shift" phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg's Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the "Generalized Holmberg…

This dissertation examines Ilocano, an Austronesian Filipino language, within the Minimalist Framework, in an effort to tease apart the general syntactic properties of the language. I show that Ilocano underlying structure can easily be captured within the standard syntactic structures proposed for languages generally (Universal Grammar). In my…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of oblique relative clauses in L2 Spanish by English and Moroccan Arabic speakers in order to understand the role of previous linguistic knowledge and its interaction with Universal Grammar on the one hand, and the relationship between grammatical knowledge and its use in real-time, on the other hand.…

Argues that the i-within-i condition (Chomsky, 1981) is both empirically inadequate and theoretically incoherent. A definition for circular chains, a condition on the interpretation of the reference of free pronominals and anaphors, is proposed that adequately accounts for the data involving referential circularity that had been previously…

A critical analysis explores the strictly logical aspects and pragmatic claims of a presupposition and negation theory (Burton-Roberts, 1989). Other clearly relevant facts, not previously considered, are used to show that the theory preempted empirical issues on invalid a priori grounds. (23 references) (Author/CB)

A response to a critical analysis of a theory on presupposition and negation uses that critique's claims and proposed system to corroborate the original arguments and theory. (24 references) (Author/CB)

Examines reflexivization in Italian and demonstrates that the proposals that (1) reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates, and (2) the specified subject and tensed-S conditions, cannot be maintained as universals. (AM)

Explains the Greenbergian universals of modifier and adposition ordering as accidental side effects of diachronic derivation. An argument is made that disparate diachronic processes can conspire to give the effect of synchronic universals. For example, the ordering of modifiers may result from their generation by means of binding anaphor strategy.…

Evidence is presented from an experimental study with 21 children ages 4 to 5 years suggesting the coincident emergence of certain Determiner Phrases (DPs) as barriers to wh-movement and as separate binding domains. It is argued that the default assumption for children's grammar may be to assume NP is the maximal projection for a structure until a…