This paper presents a study of Yanyula nouns and noun modifiers. Yanyula is the language spoken in parts of the Northern Territory and Queensland in Australia. In relation to noun modifiers, the paper discusses adjectives and numerals, demonstrative and possessive pronouns, prefix allomorphs, and noun modifier occurrence in noun phrases. Regarding…

Investigates how Turkish children of different ages discuss a conversation they have witnessed during a televised dialog between two Sesame Street characters. Findings reveal that there is a developmental change in children's ability to use appropriate linguistic means to orient their listeners to the different properties of a conversation. (17…

Cloze tests were administered to native- and second-language speakers in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom to analyze problems that demonstratives pose for second- language students of Japanese and English and to suggest future improvements for existing explanations and grammatical accounts for each language. (25 references)…

Discusses the advantages of the use of large natural language corpora in promoting grammatical awareness among language teachers and students, focusing on word classes and prescriptive approaches to language as they relate to Britain's National Curriculum at the elementary level. (13 references) (MDM)

Li's work, which expands the government binding (GB) literature on Chinese linguistics and contributes to understanding constituency and word order, is described. Important issues are noted, empirical or theory-neutral criticisms of Li's accounts are raised, and alternative solutions are offered. (21 references) (LB)

Short case studies show that certain inflectional categories, particularly morphological case, cannot be treated as functional heads projecting a phrase of their own. Examples are drawn from Hungarian, Finnish and Finno-Volgaic, Erzya Mordvin, Icelandic, and Turkish. (Contains 27 references.) (LB)

This paper analyses an extensive corpus of texts from the German media and existing studies of German perspectives on Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Slovenia in order to demonstrate that there are two idealised culture cognitive models (ICCMs) that function as overarching categories for Europe: the ICCM west (the members of the European…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

This paper synthesizes research on the acquisition of linguistic variation by learners of French as a second language--an overview that, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. It also presents a case study on French immersion students' acquisition of the pronouns "nous" and "on" "we," an alternation in many varieties of spoken French. The…

This article describes five political scientists' interview-based accounts of appropriate and inappropriate use of the pronouns "I" and "we" in academic writing. The informants talked about pronoun use with reference to one of their own journal articles and also by referring to other informants' texts. Beliefs about appropriate…

A study investigated the use of negative polarity items (NPIs) in child language, and in particular, how children acquire the restrictions on these items. Data are drawn from studies of NPIs in the spontaneous speech of Dutch- and English-speaking children. Results show the first NPIs to appear in Dutch and English are widely different…

An analysis of the instrumental case in four languages (English, Hungarian, Kongo, and Nepali) compares expressions of each of the deep cases of instrumentality (tool, body part, material, and force) in each language. Observations are based on a translation exercise given to native speakers of the languages and on follow-up interviews. The…

Four papers on syntax and morphology are presented. "Clitics in Slavic" (Mila Dimitrova-Vulchanova) discusses the syntactic relevance of clitic placement across Slavic languages, and the functional categories that are or might be instrumental in determining placement of clitics and clitic clusters. In "A Promotion Analysis of…

An analysis of the evolution of reflexive verbs focuses on reflexive to middle voice development in two-form middle systems, which include Russian, Old Norse, Turkish, and Hungarian. The diachronic processes associated with these systems are examined. The changes in the languages over time represent a gradual change in the semantics of the…

This study gathered information on the acquisition of affixes in Urdu by native children. The research was carried out in the city of Irbid, in northern Jordan, and in the capital city of Amman. Data consist of tape-recorded, naturally occurring and elicited speech of 13 children aged 2.4 to 9 years. The children were native speakers of Urdu,…