Presents a study of young children's understanding that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by pronominal adjectives. Some nonsyntactic theories are discussed that support the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through the rules that order abstract linguistic categories. (31 references) (GLR)

This study investigated the performance of native and non native speakers of Modern Greek language on morphology and syntax tasks. Non-native speakers of Greek whose native language was English, which is a language with strict word order and simple morphology, made more errors and answered more slowly than native speakers on morphology but not…

The rules usually taught for german word order and order of sentence elements are seen as inaccurate. A numerical system is proposed which takes from the Duden grammar the three-field system, using the predicate segments as an orientation point. (IFS/WGA)

Proposes description of Latin syntactic structures through an analysis of their communicative functions. (AM)

Discusses first- and second-language word order acquisition. A version of the OV/VO parameter is developed that is not construction specific. It relates various empirical domains, including basic word order, scrambling, exceptional case marking, and the distribution of particles. (Author/JL)

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject--verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of "attraction" errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a…

An error corpus of deviant SVO structure was collected from the translation projects of students majoring in translation. Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discoursal criteria were used to judge the deviations. Percentages of interlingual and intralingual errors, the syntactic contexts in which subjects were misplaced, the strategies used to…

Recent proposals concerning the relationship between thematic structure and syntactic structure, including the idea of thematic hierarchy, when used with certain language-specific properties, offer insight into some problems concerning the Mandarin Chinese phrase structure condition (PSC). The PSC is such that the internal structure of XP contains…

The dislocation of sentence elements in spoken French is seen as allowing the speaker to free himself from certain constraints imposed on word order, position of accents, and grammar. Dislocation is described, its various functions are enumerated, and implications for second language instruction are outlined. (MSE)

Argues that the fundamental word order of Mandarin Chinese is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and describes word order change from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese. (AM)

Examines constituent order in Haida sentences. (AM)

Replies to issues raised by Bouchard and Dubuisson (B&D) (1995) about American Sign Language (ASL), refuting B&D's assertion that visual-gestural languages are not bound by any universal constraints on word order and reaffirming that ASL is a highly configurational language with a basic underlying syntactic structure as well as an…

Demonstrates how syntactic constraints interact in the interpretation of Verb Phrase inversion. Specifically, it is shown that the auxiliary "be" is unique among auxiliary verbs in allowing VP inversion. (38 references) (VWL)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

Summarizes some of the syntactic differences between English and Japanese in such areas as word order, wh-movement, subject-auxiliary inversion, expletives, multiple subject constructions, scrambling, and modifiable pro-forms in Japanese. (26 references) (CB)