Three experiments presented nonsense verbs to two-year-olds either in syntactic isolation or embedded within a transitive syntactic frame. Found that children had identifiable action biases in the absence of syntactic information and that these biases were shifted by the addition of a transitive syntactic frame. (MDM)

Argues that the current popular negative critique of television, if examined carefully, reveals fundamental confusions concerning how print and television communicate information. Discusses the syntax of motion which distinguishes television from print, based on movement in space--a space that is both visual and acoustic. (SR)

Critiques Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier-scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, showing serious theoretical problems with their results and proposing a quantifier-scope analysis that avoids those problems. The proposed expert system considers several important considerations and arrives at a composite…

Three studies examined the role of ontological and syntactic information in children's learning of words for physical entities, such as objects and substances. Results reveal a strong and changing developmental interaction for the use of ontologically relevant perceptual information, labels, and syntax. (Author/VWL)

Proposes teaching three ways to suppress the agent in French: indefinite subject pronoun, pronominal verbs, and passive voice. Recommends that, instead of showing beginning students how to avoid the passive, they should learn how to stress activity at the expense of the agent. Contemporary or recent beginning and intermediate textbooks are…

Proposes a model to account for the uses to which the individual puts formulaic language, and specifically, what determines the choice for that person of a holistic or analytic processing strategy at any given moment. Formulaic language is used to describe a phenomenon that encompasses various types of wordstrings that appear to be stored and…

Examines Ga/No conversion in Japanese under the Move F theory of movement (Chomsky, 1995). Building on Miyagawa's (1993) analysis, argues that a genitive phrase raises out of a prenominal gapless clause in either overt or covert syntax. (Author/VWL)

Examines the reduction of syntactic options in South Texas Spanish narrative discourse during the nineteenth century. Argues that nineteenth century Texas Spanish made ample use of the absolute construction as an orientation strategy in narrative discourse. (Author/VWL)

Accounts for the observation that in a broad range of genetically unrelated languages two classes of direct objects are found that are based on their semantic and syntactic properties. Specifically, splits are found in case marking, object position, and the ability of the object to trigger verb agreement. Proposes that this split in object…

Provides evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky (1981), with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure. Implications are that syntax is subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky, and the time course of…

Describes memory task performance of a 50-year-old female with a phonological short-term memory (STM) impairment. The patient showed a deficit of syntactic parsing restricted to the auditory modality, possibility because of an impaired STM and an impaired syntactic parser. Test material and results are appended. (Contains 39 references.) (Author)

Explores the interactional significance of grammar on turn-taking in Japanese in view of reported conversation analytic findings on turn-taking for Anglo-American English. Particular focus is on ways in which grammar may be implicated in the conversation of turns at speaking and the projection of turn endings in Japanese talk-in-interaction.…

Examined effects of animacy on production of different syntactic structures and word orders by Catalan-speaking children, and explored the relationship between age and the production of different syntactic structures by children. Results of a picture description task show that participants tended to produce more object-dislocated descriptions when…

Focuses on the interaction of phonology with syntax, and to some extent, with meaning in a natural sign language. Adopts a theory of prosodic phonology, testing both its assumptions, which had been based on data from spoken language, and its predictions on the language of the Deaf community in Israel. (Author/VWL)

Presents a morphological classification of languages from the information retrieval (IR) perspective. Discusses differences in inflection, derivation, and compounding; index of synthesis and index of fusion; cross-language retrieval research; the need for semantic and syntactic typologies; and the effects of morphology and stemming in IR.…