Presents an heuristic procedure, based on cooccurrence of forms, for identifying the closed systems of a language and to show how the systems interlock, differ in meaning, and manifest themselves. (AM)

Revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta, Georgia, December 1972. (DD)

The research reported is part of an investigation into the acquisition of grammar, using nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Three children were seen for approximately 8 hours, every 6 weeks, in their homes, from the age of 19 months--soon after the earliest…

Presents an analysis of noun phrases in which the definite article is used and omitted. Several studies are reviewed and two types of occurrences are distinguished: direct (agent, instrument, object) and oblique (locative, dative). The relationships, perceptible in the deep structure, are blurred in the transformations leading to surface…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…