The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the "Structure-Building Model" and the "Continuity Hypothesis" within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain…

This study reports on the use of (c)overt subjects and subject-verb agreement in Hebrew in the spontaneous speech of a child, EK, acquiring Hebrew and English simultaneously from birth and of five slightly younger Hebrew monolingual controls. Analysis shows that EK's production of pragmatically inappropriate overt subjects is more than three times…

This study investigates the syntactic abilities of ten individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) (mean chronological age: 8;9 years; mean mental age: 4;8 years) and Down's syndrome (DS) (mean chronological age: 8;7 years; mean mental age: 4;6 years), matched individually on chronological age, mental age and performance IQ. The syntactic components…

Two rating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., "Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste"), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses…

This study investigated the performance of native and non native speakers of Modern Greek language on morphology and syntax tasks. Non-native speakers of Greek whose native language was English, which is a language with strict word order and simple morphology, made more errors and answered more slowly than native speakers on morphology but not…

This study compares quantitative and qualitative results for task-based second language (L2) grammar instruction conducted as whole-class, teacher-led discourse (TLD) versus small-group, learner-led discourse (LLD). Participants included 78 English-speaking adults from six university classes of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each…

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

This paper examines several previously-unexplained aspects of verbal morphology and syntax in Madija, an Arauan languages spoken in Peru and Brazil. These include the distribution of an auxiliary verb that occurs with some predicates but not with others and the factors that determine the choice among three different affixes marking third person…

Good writing is good sentences. It is a simple truth that many in the business of teaching writing have strayed from. Good writing is a first sentence that makes a reader want to read the second sentence, a second sentence that makes a reader want to read the third, and so on. Erika Lindemann suggests that certain types of sentence instruction can…

A study of French "wh" questions, particularly questions using "que" and "quoi," looks at conventional syntactic explanations and presents a new analysis. Relevant facts and pertinent claims about these questions are reviewed, the researcher's assumptions about the working of Wh questions are explained, the new…

This paper presents an alternative analysis of tough constructions for N. Chomsky's 1981 wh-movement analysis of tough constructions. To replace Chomsky's solution and to obviate the need for generalized transformations in Government-Binding (GB) theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in which the tough subject originates as an embedded…

Natural systems are self-organizing and stratify according to the angular articulation of their movements. In particular, movement is relative to the levels that define its behavior space. As natural phenomenon, text production is self-referential, In generating information, the intention of the producer of a text becomes specified. Specifying of…

An analysis of pronouns in Zapotec languages looks at their behavior across the language family, noting where the languages are alike or different. Seven regional Zapotec variations are used for illustration, including: Isthmus; Yatzachi; Yalalag; Texmelucan; Atepec; Guelavia; and Xanaguia. A major conclusion is that the traditional division of…

Establishes the considerations of factivity, or concern with truth-value, and fictivity, or concern with realizational status, as basic to the concept of modality. This makes possible the inclusion of factive and implicative verbs in the concept of modality, and clarifies semantic differences between the Russian and English modal auxiliary…

That "will" and "shall" are modal, not temporal, verbs is shown by their syntactic similarity to the modals and by the fact that they follow the same transformational rules as the modals. This example demonstrates the usefulness of transformational grammar in explaining grammatical relationships to students. (Text is in…