Locative inversion, one aspect of word order in English discourse in which the positions of verb and noun phrase are inverted (e.g., "in front of the house is a tree"), is examined. It is argued that inversions after deictic adverbs and those after non-deictic, locative constituents are related, both representing devices: (1) expressing point of…

A description of the pragmatic functions of word order in the Bantu language, Sesotho, and of how children begin to produce them illustrates the developmental trends characterizing Sesotho-speaking children's learning of different word orders. It supports findings from previous language acquisition studies that have indicated that children tend…

A number of studies on the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase are reviewed. Analysis of the studies and examples used in them indicates that almost any order of adjective seems to be possible depending on the intended meaning of the speaker or the situation in which the speaker frames an utterance. To see if in fact the ordering of…

Textual puzzles may be used in freshman composition or introduction to writing courses to emphasize word order and subject-predicate agreement. These sentence puzzles demonstrate that the English language depends primarily upon word order to convey meaning, and assist students to avoid blending statement and question word order in their sentences…

Considered article and noun position as syntactic cues indicating the focus of sentential negation in 7- and 10-year-olds and adults. Noun position and article independently influenced the focus of negation. Developmental differences in the uses of articles were related to the acquisition of mastery of the article system. (SKC)

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)

Although Japanese word order is considered flexible and can often be changed without causing semantic change, there is consistent regidity in the language, as explained here. (CHK)

Explores the phenomenon of post verbal alternation in English double object constructions and presents a statistical model for predicting the position of the indirect object in instances where alternation is unconstrained. The study includes analysis of a large set of written and oral American English data using a parametric multiple regression…

A bilingual child's development of word order in German and English subordinate clauses was followed between age 3 and 5, and a number of diversions from the development of word order in such clauses by monolingual children was noted. (Contains five references.) (Author/LB)

Using data from American and Quebec Sign Languages, this article argues against linguistic theories that postulate either that a language has a basic order determined by universal principles or that there is a single universal order for all languages. Maintains that there are other means a language can use to indicate what elements combine…

Evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The results of a study show that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. (22 references) (GLR)

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is…

In this brief report, we summarize the results of an experiment on the interpretation of English word order patterns by adult Korean- and Japanese-speaking second language learners. Our results suggest that a direct relationship between a construction's word order and the structure of the corresponding event has a greater facilitative effect on…

We report two experiments examining the role of concreteness and word phonological neighborhood characteristics on immediate serial recall. In line with previous findings concreteness, word frequency, and larger neighborhood size are associated with better serial recall. Both concreteness and word neighborhood size were also positively associated…