Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

How to support students in programming learning has been a great research challenge in the last years. To address this challenge, prior works have mainly focused on proposing solutions based on syntactic analysis to provide students with personalized feedback about their grammatical programming errors and misconceptions. However, syntactic…

The objective of this chapter is to explore the relevance of cognitive linguistics for teaching [noun] + [noun] constructions to French learners of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and more specifically, for process engineering. After a review of research on Compound Nouns (CNs) and explicit versus implicit learning, three basic tenets of…

Examines language frontier and transitional zones along the Belgium-northwestern France linguistic border as area occupying important position in linguistic contact research. Gives examples of variant forms in the morphosyntactic, semantic, stylistic, and lexical forms. (Author/BK)

Investigates the double compound that is a feature of the regional French of the langue d'oc and franco-provencal areas. Analysis suggests that, in addition to the temporal and aspectual properties traditionally attributed to this form, the expressive properties of the surcompose regional are central to any description of its function in…

The 33 papers, all in French, from the 1996 conference on research in linguistics address a wide range of topics in linguistics, including: linguists as an endangered species; categorizing verb specifiers in Yoruba; socio-terminology as a framework for understanding the language of orthodontia; French-to-Arabic borrowings in the 19th and 20th…

English translations of articles in French in this issue include these: "Discourse Reported in the Print Media"; "Comparison of Register in Quebec and French Speakers"; "Method of Description of Specialized Verbs in View of Machine Translation Applications"; "Dialectal Areas in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande…