This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a…

Deaf Learners' Acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two…

The structure of complementation in complex predicates in Korean has attracted configurational analysis. Using a lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework, this paper examines the structure of complementation in complex predicates. The term "predicate" in this context is used to describe both verbs and adjectives that are assumed to…

A study examined the type of Wh question (those introduced by who, what, when, where, why, or how) and the phrase structure rules required for the verb phrase to determine how they relate to the acquisition and development of the Wh question transformation. Children ranging in age from 2 to 6 years were given three tasks, each containing 36…

This volume contains ten articles and a book review. Josef Vachek talks about "Vilem Mathesius as Forerunner of Contrastive Linguistic Studies." In "Contrastive Generative Grammar and the Psycholinguistic Fallacy," Andrew Chesterman discusses methods for accounting for simplification in foreign language learning. Michael Post compares "English…

In early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky (1968, 1972) came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presuppostion and scope of quantifiers, must be…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of coordination reduction in various languages and to propose a universal set of rules that will account for all types of coordination reduction. In a brief discussion of some of the more recent proposals on coordination reduction it will be shown that these proposals fail to account for the…

During the past fifteen years, a variety of linguistic analyses of the tense and aspect systems of dialects of English has been conducted. These analyses were bounded by several analytic dimensions. This paper treats three of these dimensions and discusses their interrelationships and implications in relation to two dialects--Black English and…

Responds to criticism of an earlier (1984) paper in which it was argued that the complements of Welsh control and raising verbs should be analyzed as verb phrases (VPs) and not as clauses with empty subjects. The l984 position is defended against the traditional analysis in the three critiqued areas.

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…

From the standpoint of transformational grammar, this experimental work evaluates the extent to which children choose or fail to generalize their rules for the placement of the negative particles "not" and "n't." The subjects were eight three- and four-year-olds of middle-class background who had been producing sentences with…

This report examines the question of whether grammatical rules are globally learned and applied. It also attempts to determine the underlying word order in English as well as the developmental sequence of the acquisition of Aux. A sentence-repetition test using positive statements, positive questions, and negative questions was administered to 30…

This article examines the variable absence of the verb in "as far as" constructions, which serve as qualifiers or topic restrictors in English. (46 references) (Author/CK)

In the past, linguistic descriptions of the relationships common to passive sentences have not been universally applicable. Junction grammar, a type of generative grammar, is a model that may provide a means of describing universal passive relationships. Junction grammar differs from transformational grammar in that its rules (1) claim other…

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)