Discusses pedagogical descriptions in high school textbooks covering Spanish reflexive verb constructions. Points out that these textbooks rarely contain the full reflexive construction displayed with all the grammatical persons and complete English glosses. (17 references) (Author/CK)

Addresses the relationship between phonology and morphology, using the vowel alternations of Standard German Umlaut and Ablaut as relevant examples. The article analyzes Umlaut as a completely unified process of vowel fronting, whereas it argues that Ablaut is synchronically a totally unpredictable vowel change found in the paradigms of strong…

The role of prosodic breaks (PB) in the parsing of locally ambiguous noun phrases (NP) + verb (V) + NP + prepositional phrase (PP) was examined in four word-monitoring experiments. Results indicate that PBs can influence sentence parsing. The article discusses possible mechanisms in the framework of two models. (32 references) (Author/CK)

A study compared 14 younger adults (ages 21-26) and 13 older adults (ages 60-70) to investigate the effects that argument structure can have on language processing, reaction-time, and event-related potential (ERP). High-complexity stimuli produced higher P300 amplitudes than low-complexity stimuli. The older group demonstrated significantly longer…

Examines the different spoken conditional verb forms used with reference to future time as manifested in the speech habits of those Mexican Americans living in Houston. The frequency with which certain variant forms appear indicates a definite trend in the evolution of linguistic change. Within this linguistic context, the imperfect subjunctive…

Suggests that there are universal constraints that explain the so-called "Definiteness Effect," i.e., the fact that certain constructions do not allow for definite arguments in certain positions. The article founds its proposal on the analysis of data from Hungarian and English. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Reports two experiments that assessed the role of orthography in constraining subject verb agreement in written and spoken French. Contrasted a condition in which the singular and plural forms of the subject head nouns were homophones but non-homographs with a condition in which the subject head ones were homophones and homographs in their…

Reports findings of a corpus analysis of a grammatical structure taught in intermediate- or advanced-level English-as-a-Second-/Foreign-Language texts: clauses that contain the modal "would" to signify hypothetical and counterfactual meaning. Categorizes the conditional and hypothetical uses of would-clauses in spoken and written corpora…

Presents an interview with Noriko Akatsuka concerning her studies of the relationship between a speaker's state of mind and modality. Notes that the interviewee has concentrated on conditionals using data chiefly from Japanese, Korean, and English, with the primary goal of using conditional construction as a tool to investigate questions…

Discusses key points raised in the articles in this special issue of the journal. Suggests progress is being made in using complementary theories of the role of lexical representation, prediction, and crosslinguistic variation to get a full picture of this complex area of lexico-morhposyntactic knowledge. (Author/VWL)

A study observed a significant curvilinear relationship between speaking rates and accentedness and comprehensibility judgments of utterances produced by users from a variety of first language backgrounds. A second study manipulated rates with speech compression-expansion software established that this effect was due to the rate differences rather…

Describes the results of a study conducted with 28 adult third-year learners of Spanish to investigate the degree to which idiom type affects the speed and ease of idiom comprehension and interpretation, and the effect that context exerts on idiom understanding. Findings are discussed. (VWL)

Examines one kind of syntactic variation--variable subject pronoun presence with American Sign Language plain verbs. Focuses on narratives that occurred during conversations recorded as part of a larger study. (Author/VWL)

Argues that a Universal Grammar (UG)-based analysis for the three stages of NEG-placement is not only possible, but in fact provides independent support for UG-based analyses of the developmental sequence found in first-language Romance language and second-language German verb placement. (41 references) (GLR)

Data are presented from Amele and other Papuan languages to show how the medial verb form is marked for a binary distinction of realis versus irrealis modality. It is demonstrated that in these languages realis-irrealis distinction interacts with categories of tense and mood marked on the final verb to divide them into domains of realis and…