The use of deictic words from 5 classes by 4 preschool teachers and 12 children with hearing losses was examined. Teachers used a total of 648 deictic words versus the children's 172 examples. Personal pronouns were the most frequently used class, followed by demonstrative pronouns, adverbs of location, shifting reference verbs, and adverbs of…

In a study of event knowledge, 13 2-year-olds were observed interacting with their mothers over a 5-month period. Results indicated that children's increasing event knowledge facilitated their language development (e.g., lexical type use, action verb use) and their lexical token use. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/LB)

A detailed study of the developing intuitions of English-speaking adult learners of second-language French was conducted. One finding, that English-speaking learners of French can use nonparametrized properties of Universal Grammar to handle surface syntactic English-French differences, supports an emerging view about the role of parametrized…

Examined the representation of phrase structure in early child German through the investigation of longitudinal data from seven German-speaking toddlers with respect to verb placement, verb inflection, negation, /wh/ pronouns, and complementizers. It is argued that children construct phrase-structure trees in a gradual fashion, on the basis of…

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

The relationship between prototype meanings and frequency of use is investigated with a view to establishing a foundation for the problem of "prototype acquisition." One polysemous basic verb, "put," is used in this study of native speaker discourse, and implications for both prototype theory and the acquisition of polysemy are…

In an examination of the complex interaction of the linguistic devices employed in the expression of temporality, eight adult English-as-a-Second-Language learners participated in a study of time adverbials and verbal morphology. (19 references) (LB)

Historic linguistic consequences were studied in five separate areas of Atlantic Canada's Acadian population. Focus was on certain verbs in the third person present plural and the hypothesis that "allent" and faisent" are the result of hypercorrection. Results suggest complex reasons for their use and an indication of some social…

Discusses the possessive, existential, and locational usages of the Mandarin Chinese verb "you3," arguing for the formulation of a single lexical entry of the verb within lexical-functional grammar and demonstrating the similarities between English idiom chunks and you3 expressions. (20 references) (Author/CB)

Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

This study examined the acquisition of verb particles and prepositions in language-impaired, language-matched, and age-matched preschool children (total n=42). Results indicated that the use of verb particles constituted a particularly challenging task for the language-impaired subjects relative to both the age-matched and language-matched peers.…

In clauses with future meaning in Biblical Hebrew, there are consistent functional differences between clauses with verb-initial word order and clauses with non-verb-initial word order. Verb-initial clauses are associated with future events involving cooperation between the speaker, listener, and God. (16 references) (Author/LB)

The marking of past temporal reference in Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Trinidadian English is compared. Similarities in the patterns of variation according to verb type and phonological conditioning suggest that past marking in contemporary BEV preserves traces of an earlier shift from a creole pattern to one approximating the Standard…

Significant features of the official October 1990 orthographic reforms in French are outlined and their pedagogical implications are discussed briefly. The changes, primarily simplifications and not major changes, affect use of the hyphen, plurals, diacritical markings, verb tenses, and correction of anomalies. (MSE)

This sociolinguistic investigation analyzes an innovative usage of Spanish motion verbs, demonstratives, and locatives in Barcelona, Spain that involves crosslinguistic pragmatic transfer. Speakers in the two social networks examined (n=58) use these Spanish deictics following pragmatic rules that generally correspond to the rules for their…