A study of infant language acquisition investigated the possibility that perceptual or attentional tendencies may guide early word learning by directing infants' attention in linguistically relevant ways. In the experiment, infants aged 9 to 13 months watched a puppet show; with some children, sentences labeling either the objects (noun-frame…

The structure of complementation in complex predicates in Korean has attracted configurational analysis. Using a lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework, this paper examines the structure of complementation in complex predicates. The term "predicate" in this context is used to describe both verbs and adjectives that are assumed to…

The dictionary of Binukid, a language spoken in the Bukidnon province of the Philippines, is intended as a tool for students of Binukid and for native Binukid-speakers interested in learning English. A single dialect was chosen for this work. The dictionary is introduced by notes on Binukid grammar, including basic information about phonology and…

A number of Seri verbs display a sensitivity to whether a goal, which is a term used for recipients, adressees, etc., is singular or plural. The data presented in this paper are of typological interest. It is argued that Seri has indirect objects, but that there is no one-to-one mapping between the semantic role goal and either the syntactic…

The distribution of Hualapai auxiliary verbs "-yu" and "-wi" can not be explained only by the presence or absence of an object, or by the active or stative feature of the matrix verb. It can be explained in terms of transitivity, in that "-wi" corresponds to high transitivity and "-yu" to low transitivity of…

A discussion of the animacy hierarchy in human discourse looks at the role of the hierarchy in three Western Austronesian languages: Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, and Rejang. Animacy corresponds to the degree of agency an entity has with a transitive verb as contrasted with the degree to which that entity may be the patient of a transitive verb. The…

The relationship between the realization of the argument-structure of a verb and its acquisition as a lexical item was investigated in a case study. The subject was a girl aged 2.3 years whose father was a native English-speaker and whose mother was a native Japanese speaker who also spoke English. The child had been born in the United States but…

The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

A syntactic and semantic analysis of the morpheme "kom" in the Hmong language and its place in sentence embedding is presented. Sample sentences of other researchers were compared with information found in folk tales and the resultant hypotheses were tested on native informants. The morpheme has been previously described as meaning the…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

Deals with problems encountered by English learners of French in learning to use nouns, articles and the present tense, and in using them together. A way to revise the presentation of the French noun-article system and to make the identification of nouns and articles easier is presented. (CLK)

The modal auxiliary system in both German and English is seen as a grammatical category (relative assertion) which stands in specific opposition to the absence of a modal in a sentence (factual assertion). (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

The fact that impersonal verbs in Russian do not form active participles or gerunds is discussed and explained. (RM)

Verb stems are classified according to the particular group of nouns they appear with. The system reflects a taxonomy of situations involving concrete objects. A verb is chosen according to the shape and number of the object, if it is sitting, falling, etc., and according to the speaker's intention. (SCC)

The major divisions in Olympic Salish are not completely mutually intelligible. The major differences are lexical, and there are also some phonological and syntactic ones. The VSO order, the ways of indicating negatives, and the syntactic distribution of the copula are discussed. (SCC)