This epilogue addresses the most important topics and challenges for the Morphosyntactic Level in Functional Discourse Grammar that have been raised in the articles in this Special Issue. We begin by exploring the differences between the Morphosyntactic Level in FDG and the treatment of morphosyntactic phenomena in other linguistic frameworks. We…

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

Clarifies Grosjean's Language Mode (LM) hypothesis, which develops the notion of language mode or the relative state of activation of a bilinguals two or more languages and language processing systems. Discusses studies that do not support views of the LM hypothesis. Studies of Dutch-English bilingual are presented. (Author/VWL)

This study focuses on the morphosyntactic aspects of Cantonese-English code-mixing as commonly spoken by bilinguals, most of whom are Cantonese. A corpus of Cantonese-English code-switching collected from informal conversations is analyzed in terms of structural properties, followed by a critique of the major constraints or principles that have…

An investigation, analyzing the linking of skeleton and syntactical rules of Madurese, presents counterevidence to Marantz's claims about the nature of reduplication, and to Carrier-Duncan's claim that reduplication must precede all phonological rules. It is proposed that reduplication in Madurese is not affixation, as Marantz claims, and can be…

Summarizes the results of Finnish studies dealing with single-word experiments with aphasics as well as lexical decisions and eye-movement registration tests performed on normals. It then proposes a processing model for Finnish nouns, Stem Allomorph/Inflectional Decomposition (SAID), which predicts that both inflected and productive derived forms…

Suppletion is allomorphy that is produced by retrieving from the lexicon different phonological forms of the morpheme in question. A suppletive allomorph's use may be conditioned by grammatical or phonological context, or a combination. Its use therefore has dual motivation: the fact that it is governed by grammatical rule, and that its use in…

Questions Bloom's (1984) assertion that, because the Chinese do not employ counterfactual conditionals, the Chinese have not developed a labeled cognitive schema that allows them to process counterfactuals "naturally" (as opposed to the English). It is demonstrated that Arabic contains a specific counterfactual marker, yet Arabic…

Four experimental studies were designed to test, in Norwegian, the hypothesis that children's non-adultlike interpretations of pronouns may be partly attributable to a lexical factor interacting with the A-Chain Condition. (Author/VWL)

Comments are offered on an earlier paper on theory construction in second-language acquisition. A critical perspective is offered that is characterized by the ethical foundations of theory construction (and scientific activity in general) and the grounding of theory in practical activity. (60 references) (Author/LB)

Two competing hypotheses about speech processing were examined in two experiments. The hypotheses were that: (1) people rely on the configurational properties of sentences in relative clause (RC) processing; and (2) people rely on the grammatical roles of the noun phrases involved in relativization in RC processing. The first experiment used a…

Demonstrates how the definition of "simple attachment" and "tree lowering," operations related to the grammatical composition operations of "substitution" and "adjunction" in the Tree Adjoining Grammar formalism, yields a parser more constrained than previous description theory based models. The article…

An exploratory application of the "acquisitional strategies" framework investigated English-speaking language learners' acquisition of preposition stranding in Dutch. Interesting syntactic and morphological contrasts in both English and Dutch render the framework a valuable empirical tool for evaluating language acquisition strategies. (Author/CB)

A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

A discussion of young children's production of English utterances with missing constituents focuses on the omission of subjects. The theory that young children have different grammars from those of adults is disputed, and it is suggested that, instead, subjects are omitted due to performance factors. Processing limitations in child language are…