English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

Melvyn C. Goldstein, an anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University, has spent 40 years, off and on, collecting oral histories from Tibet. As rural Tibetans who have endured decades of tumult approach old age, Goldstein, who is also a director of the university's Center for Research on Tibet, has preserved their stories. He has interviewed…

Outlines an analysis that seeks to show that the differences between English restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses can be analyzed within the Government-Binding Theory, argues against the assumption that only nominals can be subjects, and argues that the assumption that Spec-Head agreement applies within CP, which plays an important role in one…

The topic chain is a frequently used structure in Chinese. In this article, its structural characteristics and its use in written narrative text are examined. Three major claims are made: (a) The topic of a chain does not have to overtly occur in the chain-initial clause as commonly believed; (b) depending on the context, a zero noun phrase (NP)…

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the "principled polysemy model" of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of "over". Language 77, 724-765;…

The particular forms of relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese lead to particular cognitive, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse constraints on speakers and writers. In this study, analyses of oral and written Mandarin Chinese narratives demonstrate that SS structures (subject head noun phrase [NP] modified by a subject RC) are produced more…

This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., "social services"). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC);…

This pilot study examined the development of complexity and fluency of second language (L2) spoken production among L2 learners who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks as constituent units of discourse. Twenty-two students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course at a U.S. university received classroom instruction on 40 grammatical…

From incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828, through the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 governmental language policies and other socio/political forces influenced the Turkic population of the Republic of Azerbaijan to speak Russian. Even with changes since independence Russian use--including various kinds of code-switching and…

Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. Varied exposures to newly acquired words as they occur in meaningful contexts may facilitate the process of vocabulary learning. In this study we investigated the effects of such a multiple-strategy-based vocabulary teaching approach. We conducted an…

This study attempts to shed new light on one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction--the English phrasal verbs. The highest frequency phrasal verb constructions in the 100-million-word British National Corpus are identified and analyzed. The findings indicate that a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines…

This study extends Safir's (1987) analysis of Noun Phrase (NP) Predication. It argues that, for NPs to function predicationally, they must satisfy not only Safir's Predicate Principle, but also the Predicate Condition (a condition which requires NP predicates to be fully saturated.) (Contains 16 references.) (Author)

A description of the circumstances in which the various types of past tense can or cannot be used in final clauses with "damit." (Text is in German.) (TL)

A group of 20 subjects learned sentences that contained associatively related words while another group of 20 subjects learned low association sentences. The probability of a transitional error was used as a measure of the tendency to integrate the words within the sentences into phrase units. The results suggest that phrase structures may have…

The research reported here casts doubt on the general value of the Yngve hypothesis, which relates a phrase structure measure of syntactic complexity to both sentence production and memory. (Author/FWB)