The adverbial phrase "a lo mejor" (at best) does not take the subjunctive, although other adverbial expressions of possibility may be followed by either indicative or subjunctive. Examines statements co-occurring with "a lo mejor" from the viewpoint of statement and mood, taking into account communicative discourse function. The study shows that…

Provides an analysis of the frequency of verbs and their syntactic requirements in "Interchange" (Richards et al., 1991), a popular series of textbooks for English as a Second Language (ESL). A corpus analysis of "Interchange" suggests that ESL materials may underrepresent some of the verb classes that are known to cause learners difficulty.…

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…

Studies the quotative system of contemporary British and Canadian youth. Multivariate analysis of nearly 1300 quotative verbs demonstrates that the innovative form "be like" is productive in both Canada and Britain. Traditional quotatives such as "say,""go,""think" are used according to somewhat different…

Tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as "don't giggle me." Ninety-six children were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. Found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and preemption, but only for…

Describes a technique for teaching the French prepositions "a and de" by explaining the syntactic process implicit in verbs that are followed by those prepositions. Outlines sentence structure based on several verb types. (MSE)

Demonstrates that both meanings of an ambiguity are accessed at the onset of the ambiguity when the context is biased towards the secondary meaning. This evidence does not support the context-dependent model, which says that contextual bias should aid the processor in selecting a meaning. (Author/VWL)

Syntactic priming studies demonstrate that exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent utterances. Explanations for this phenomenon rely on either the retrieval of morphosyntactic features associated with the verb in the prime sentence or the preservation of the mapping between message…

This article reports on a corpus-based, developmental pedagogical intervention for the teaching of German modal particles (MPs) in which learners examined their own emerging MP use as well as that of their native-speaking keypals in the context of electronically mediated, project-based collaboration. Individual learner development was traced…

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in…

The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modified by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the effect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension…

Two studies investigated the interaction between utterance and scene processing by monitoring eye movements in agent-action-patient events, while participants listened to related utterances. The aim of Experiment 1 was to determine if and when depicted events are used for thematic role assignment and structural disambiguation of temporarily…

Previous studies of verb morphology in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have been limited in the main to tense and agreement morphemes. Cantonese, which, like other Chinese languages, has no grammatical tense, presents an opportunity to investigate potential difficulties for children with SLI in other areas of verb morphology, via…

A critical aspect of the assessment of children's word learning processes is the examination of word knowledge growth over time. The purpose of this study was to examine the types of partial word knowledge (PWK) growth that occurred from 1 exposure to unfamiliar words in text, taking into account the roles of part of speech and individual language…

Disfluencies include editing terms such as "uh" and "um" as well as repeats and revisions. Little is known about how disfluencies are processed, and there has been next to no research focused on the way that disfluencies affect structure-building operations during comprehension. We review major findings from both computational linguistics and…