Different morphological theories assign different status to parts of words, roots and affixes. Models range from accepting both bound roots and affixes to only assigning unit status to standalone words. Some questions that interest researchers are (1) What are the smallest morphological units, words or word parts? (2) How does frequency affect…

This dissertation investigates several topics in the morphology, syntax and semantics of the Nez Perce verb and verbal clause. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the morphological segmentation of the Nez Perce verb and on the semantic description of the verb and clause. Chapter 1 provides a grammar sketch. Chapter 2 discusses the…

This is a corpus-based research focusing on the high-frequency verb "keep" used by Chinese non-English majors and native speakers. The corpora involved in the paper are Brown which stands for native speakers, Students 3 and Students 4 in CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) which stand for Chinese non-English majors. The paper tries to…

There are several accounts of why some individuals with post-stroke aphasia experience difficulty in producing morphologically complex verbs. Although a majority of these individuals also produce syntactically flawed utterances, at least two accounts focus on word-level encoding operations. One account proposes a difficulty with rule-governed…

This paper investigated children's ability to use syntactic structures to infer semantic information. The particular syntax-semantics link examined was the one between transitivity (transitive/intransitive structures) and telicity (telic/atelic perspectives; that is, boundedness). Although transitivity is an important syntactic reflex of telicity,…

This study aims to determine how a hostage drama in Iraq involving an overseas Filipino worker was framed in English-language newspapers in the Philippines. Data came from the July 9-25, 2004 issues of five leading English-language broadsheets in the Philippines. The study found that the event was given maximum salience and prominence by the…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…

A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as "the key to the cabinets", with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as "the keys to the cabinet", where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are…

Recent work showed that infants recognize and store function words starting from the age of 6-8 months. Using a visual fixation procedure, the present study tested whether French-learning 14-month-olds have the knowledge of syntactic categories of determiners and pronouns, respectively, and whether they can use these function words for…

There is a considerable linguistic debate on whether phrasal verbs (e.g., "turn up," "break down") are processed as two separate words connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. Moreover, views differ on whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their syntactically-connected or lexical…

This paper investigates the distribution of imperfective and perfective verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Spontaneous speech of three children (1 ; 8-3; 1) was analyzed for accuracy and error types. The results showed that the verbal inflections appeared correct almost all the time (89-97% of the time). Agreement errors appeared 3-11% of the…

Purpose: To establish whether the predictions of the extended optional infinitive (EOI) hypothesis (Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995) hold for the language of Afrikaans-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and whether tense marking is a possible clinical marker of SLI in Afrikaans. Method: Production of tense morphology was…

This study examines the storage versus composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants…

This article presents the results of an action research study whose purpose was to apply alternatives for the development of grammatical competence in a group of third semester students of a Morphosyntax I course in an English language teaching undergraduate program at a Colombian public university. Given the fact that the teaching of grammar has…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…