The word order in Klamath, a Penutian language of southern Oregon, has been described as almost completely "free". The language is examined in terms of the effect of the relative topicality of arguments on their position preceding or following the verb. The database used for this study consisted of seven Klamath texts from Barker (1963):…

The use of the term "Creole" to refer to the Haitian language is discussed, and it is argued that "Haitian" is a more appropriate term. Psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic functions of the term are examined, including its etymological and usage history and images associated with its application in a variety of locations and…

The Seri language contains over 50 kinship terms and represents one of the most highly elaborated kinship systems described to date. This paper discusses Seri kinship terminology and centers around, but is not limited to, the set of obligatory possessed noun stems that are inflected with the following possessive prefixes":…

An analysis of tone in language begins with the observation that the structural approach taken in segmental phonology, analyzing complex tones in terms of sequences of level tones, is not necessarily appropriate with tone languages. A different approach is proposed, a "dynamic-tone" theory that represents tone contours entirely in terms…

This paper discusses the theoretical status of Vendler classes in grammar and utterance interpretation. In the 1950s Zeno Vendler outlined a taxonomy of verb classification which grouped verbs into four equal categories: (1) activity terms; (2) accomplishment terms; (3) achievement terms; and (4) state terms. Although Vendler's taxonomy still has…

This paper investigates the status of the null object in Mandarin Chinese. It proposes that if an object is topicalized, the empty category in the object position should be analyzed as a variable. If it is not topicalized, it is a "pro." It is argued that a pro resembles an overt pronoun in obeying Condition B, but differs from the…

This paper describes and analyzes the complementation patter of Hausa aspectual verbs, examining some instances of aspectual verb complementation that have not been addressed in previous research. It attempts to show that, syntactically, the phenomenon of Control in this type of complementation exists in Hausa. It demonstrates that the…

From the beginning of life, a child's acts of meaning are joint constructions, enacted through dialogue between himself and a significant other by reference to whom he is achieving a personal identity. When the child begins to control his material environment, he begins the transition to systematic symbolic construction. At the same time, he is…

This study focuses on the use of modes that are dependent on impersonal structures found in the French spoken in Quebec. Six impersonal structures are identified as causing modal variation in the subordinate. This variation is constrained mainly by linguistic factors. Social factors also influence the variation, but the amount of influence exerted…

A study investigating the acquisition of empty categories (ECs) in Sinhala, a language of the Indo-Aryan family spoken in Sri Lanka, is reported in part. The results examined here concern ECs occurring in a subset of adverbial clause types differing with regard to the kinds of null subjects they permit, including those obligatorily coindexed,…

This examination focuses on the idea that child language acquisition is constrained by the same principles that have been found to hold on syllable structure across languages. First, a recently-proposed constraint on syllable structure, the Sonority Cycle, is outlined, and the way that it accounts for syllabic structure across languages is…

A study investigated children's use of three acoustic parameters (intensity, fundamental frequency, and duration) in the production of two-syllable nonsense words. Subjects were six children each at ages 2, 3, and 4 years with age-appropriate language skills and normal hearing sensitivity. An examiner produced eight novel two-syllable words of…

There is an obvious morphological relationship between complex words such as "man-eater and self-locking" and phrases such as "eats men and locks itself." The perception of derivation suggests semantic relatedness and provides evidence for the notion of analytic synonymy and by extension, analytic hyponymy. However, judgments…

Case marking strategies in Kope, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea, are analyzed in light of previous claims that most Papuan languages have one strategy for marking core relations and another for marking peripheral relations. A brief grammatical overview illustrates how core and peripheral relations are marked in Kope, including nominal case…

An analysis of Hebrew topicalization looks at the normal or unmarked function of topicalization in narrative discourse and considers the additional contextual effects that marked or apparently redundant instances of topicalization are intended to achieve. Focus is on the fronting of elements in sentences with topic-comment articulation. It is…