The paper presents the results of a complex study of ?onsonantal phonemes' syntagmatics, registered at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the word throughout the historical development of the English language. The analysis of frequencies of consonantal clusters' actualization allowed the author to characterize the regularities of their…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

Noun-related morphosyntax has not been emphasized in the literature on children with specific language impairment (SLI), yet, across languages, problems in this area are quite apparent. This review is designed to highlight noun-related difficulties that seem to be especially troublesome for these children. A review of the research literature on…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

The importance of phonology in assigning words to the correct grammatical category in language processing is discussed. Correlations between phonology and grammatical class are discussed. Experiments demonstrating that adults and children have learned these correlations are proposed and evaluated. (SLD)

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

The distinction between formal and casual English as reflected in the lexicon, in phonology, and in syntax is studied. Formality is treated as separate from other categorizations of language such as geographical origin of the speaker, social class of the participants, or specific context of discourse. The study was restricted mainly to the use of…

A mother's interactions with her young daughter were studied with special emphasis placed upon the frequencies of linguistically instructional input and the strategies employed to provide this information. The girl was between 18 and 28 months old and her mean length of utterance (MIU) was between 1.5 and 4.3 morphemes. Only maternal input was…

According to "noun-cue" models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. "Syntactic…

The possible usefulness of computer poetry is concerned with what the programmer can learn about language, about poetry, and about poets. The problems in designing computer programs to construct poetry include considerations in generating well-formed sentences which have the added restrictions that poetry requires: meter, rhyme, logic, diction,…

Outlines a teaching approach for oral English for special purposes that inputs chunks of natural language orally. These "chunks" can be segmented by the learner into fixed and variable units, while simultaneously making the learner aware of the paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and phonological aspects of the language being taught. This…

The Kuku-Yalanji language is spoken by 500-600 Australian Aboriginal people on the coast of southeastern Cape York and inland to Chillagoe. The dictionary is of the northern dialects of Kuku-Nyungkul, the Rossville/Shipton's Flats dialect, Kuku-Yalanji, the China Camp/Daintree dialect, and Kuku-Jalunji, the Bloomfield dialect. It has three…