The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

The Macedonian verb form corresponding to the form ending in "-l" in French is examined, focusing on the active past participle, which represents the past indeterminate or non-testimonial tense. Special attention is paid to aspectual, modal, temporal, and prosodic values, and all examples are drawn from the two languages. (MSE)

The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic…

A lexical representational analysis of Classical Arabic is proposed that captures a generalization that McCarthy's (1979, 1981) autosegmental analysis misses, namely that idiosyncratic characteristics of the derivational binyanim in Arabic are lexical, not morphological. This analysis captures that generalization by treating all the idiosyncracies…

The discussion of Nweh, a Bantu language, focuses on a group of adjectives that can occur in positions where one would expect a noun, and which appear to enter noun classification. Specifically, the reasons that these adjectives have noun properties and that the pronominal class marker for the adjective is invariant are investigated. First, the…

This paper examines the distribution of third person pronominal clitics in Catalan causative constructions (CC), suggesting that an analysis of CC and cliticization crucially involving head-movement (verb incorporation and determiner incorporation) can explain the phenomena. Such an analysis can also explain the optionality of clitic climbing and…

The demonstratives in Napali are outlined, and their operation within the language system is analyzed. Demonstratives in Nepali are words used to refer to places, things, names, and activities. The reference may be endophoric (in which case the referents are in the text) or exophoric (in which case the referents are in the context or situation).…

The verb stem "maka" ("give") in Nahuatl is unusual in its range of options with respect to transitivity. Like all transitive verb stems, it regularly occurs with an object and must do so, but it also appears in an unusually large number of constructions in which it has two objects. These constructions are examined within the…

An analysis of noun classes in Tikar, a Benue-Congo language spoken in west central Cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system (possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, third-person pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals) with an eye to determining whether…

Facts on the grammar of Kazakh, spoken in Kazakhstan, are presented. They are intended as a guide, not an instructional text. Information is presented in the form of notes and word lists on the following topics: orthography (the Cyrillic alphabet, spelling reform, stylistic and dialectal alternations, common misspellings, and homographs);…

An approach to the study of numeral quantifiers in Japanese reveals some fundamental properties of Japanese, especially those pertaining to movement. Using numeral quantifiers, a demonstration shows that the subject of unaccusative verbs in Japanese originates in the object position and moves to the subject position at S-structure. It is also…

A study examines various Huastec clause types that are reflexive in some sense, including ordinary reflexives, which involve co-reference. Two mutually exclusive morphosyntactic devices are used in Huastec: reflexive pronouns and verbal morphology. In this way, Huastec is like various European languages. Clauses involving reflexive pronouns and…

The distributional and interpretive properties of the reciprocal "selo" in Korean are analyzed and compared with reciprocals in other languages, particularly Japanese and English. It is proposed that if it can be assumed that there are two homophonous "selos" in Korean, four of the five idiosyncratic properties of…

A discussion of Bolanci (also Bole or Bolewa), a West Chadic language spoken in northeastern Nigeria, focuses on one component of the system of complementation, the form "na." This form has an inherent semantic capable of influencing the meaning of sentences in which it is embedded, specifically, when present in a complex sentence,…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…