Acquisition of oral English verb morphology presents difficulties for bilinguals, learners of EFL and English-speaking monolingual children with specific language impairment. This study aimed to identify challenging English verb inflections among sixth grade speakers of Arabic (N = 85) and Hebrew (N = 86) using an elicited oral narrative task, and…

Research with young Hebrew-speaking children revealed a development in linguistic control of the system of verb-pattern alternation from nonalternation to near mastery, with the concepts of causativity and distinctions in transitivity being lexicalized earlier than others. (Author)

Presents an example of a grammaticalization type not conforming to normal expectations of unidirectionality. The Biblical Hebrew third person singular pronouns are grammaticalizations from the verb root "to be." In Modern Hebrew, the zero copula in equative clauses has been replaced by these pronouns, producing the progression: copula to pronoun…

Investigated the first verbs to participate in verb-object and subject-verb-object combinations and the temporal parameters of the spread of these combinations over different verbs, observing longitudinally young children acquiring English and Hebrew. Results indicated that the more verbs children already knew to combine in a certain pattern, the…

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…

Investigates the cross-linguistic patterns of the overgeneralization of the intransitive/transitive alternations found in children's speech and provides new evidence from findings based on the acquisition of French. The morphosyntatic characterization of such phenomena in English and Hebrew child language is followed by a description of the…

Previous theory concerning the variable behavior verbs in unaccusative/unergative alternation in Dutch, Hebrew, and Italian, which concludes that the unergative/unaccusative distinction is not syntactic but aspectual/semantic, is challenged. Discrepancies and inconsistencies are found in the grammatical functions of aspectual functional…

These papers deal with a variety of topics bearing on modality in a variety of languages and language families. While all languages have ways of expressing modality, that is, such notions as possibility, necessity, and contingency, this phenomenon has been the object of little systematic linguistic analysis. These papers are presented with the…

The ability of the computer to generate output not included in the input may be used for linguistic as well as for computational input. The ability to accept linguistic data and process it according to a certain program seems to be a promising field for investigation. Progress in this field may strengthen the assumption that the computer can be…