Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. "Marge pulled the box to Homer/*Marge pulled Homer the box"). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a…

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note…

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then…

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic)…

Argues that the account of coordination of unlike categories ought to be unified with the account of feature neutralization under phonological identity. Further argues that this unified account ought not be couched in terms of string of features, but rather in terms of the logic of categories. Study concludes with a discussion of the interactions…

Notes that the "Comparative Austronesian Dictionary" (CAD) is one of a series of comparative dictionaries planned to cover the major world language families. The CAD provides detailed information on 80 languages and additional data on the history of the Austronesian (AN) languages. Adds that the CAD gives reliable citations in a broad…