Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have language difficulties of unknown origin. Syntactic profiles are atypical, with poor performance on non-canonical structures, e.g. object relatives, suggesting a localized deficit. However, existing analyses using ANOVAs are problematic because they do not systematically address unequal…

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed…

According to the author, most grammarians have been writing stratificational grammars without knowing it because they have dealt with units that are related to one another, but not simply as a whole to its parts, or as a class to its members. The question, then, is not whether a grammar is stratified but whether it is explicitly stratified. This…

Critiques Pienemann and Johnston (1987), an influential model of the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL) morphology. The article demonstrates that their proposals are incompatible with syntactic analyses of word formation and emphasizes that second language researchers must ensure that models of second language acquisition are…

Replies to Mellow's (1996) criticism of the authors' second language acquisition model. The article argues that this model is based on the psychological concept of exchange of linguistic information and that Mellow's evaluation of various types of transformational analysis is irrelevant. The article also addresses several points of detail in…

The descriptive contents (cognitive meanings) of the modals "can,""may,""could,""might,""must,""need,""ought,""should," compared with paraphrastic verbs and adjectives, motivate two cross-classifying dimensions: logical modality (possibility, impossibility, necessity)…

Stella Center's belief in the basic importance of grammatical structure as a factor in reading comprehension substantiated the author's theory that the ability to comprehend syntactic structure is positively correlated with the ability to comprehend meaning. Original instruments devised to test this hypothesis included a test which utilized…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

Discusses the general problem of the formal correspondence between predicates and phrases, introducing the principle that the fundamental units of a lexicon are phrases rather than words. Shows that the novelty of this approach consists in an integration of lexicon and syntax and poses particular problems where the noun is concerned. (MES)

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

In an anniversary tribute to Paul Diderichsen, this report suggests that the theories and analyses put forth by Diderichsen in 1935 are central to both the general and empirical research on the Germanic languages. Particular emphasis is placed on the proposal to analyze the "verb-second-analysis" phenomenon in Germanic languages.…

Defines and illustrates the importance of lexical function in second language learning based on the "meaning-text" model of I. A. Mel'cuk. Examples in French and in English demonstrate that it is possible to combine lexical and grammatical learning. (DJD)

Focuses on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. Discusses reduced relative clauses and proposes a new lexical-structural analysis for manner of motion verbs. The article examines consequences for frequency-based models and all models whose difficulty derives from the ambiguity…

Examines the effects of other linguistic structures on the process of phonological downstep (where pitch declines during the course of utterances) in Japanese. It is concluded that the downstep process involves not only a phonological aspect but two other aspects, metrical and rhythmic. (23 references) (JL)