Compares the empiricist approach of structural linguistics with the rationalist approach to language learning. In practice, a combination of ideas from both philosophies is usually applied to the instruction of second-language learners. Language learning occurs even in the absence of theory. (SLD)

The clause in Southeastern Tepehuan consists of a predicate, its associated arguments, and other modifying elements. This paper seeks to show the various types of semantic and surface clauses and the relation between them. The semantic clause consists of various semantic components, both nuclear and peripheral, semantic prosodies, and certain…

A computer program for drawing syntactic phrase markers as trees is described. The program was developed for use on Texas Instruments Explorer Lisp machines. The tree is drawn by recursive descent, left to right. The tree-drawing function takes two arguments: (1) an atom constituting the tree, and (2) a font specification to be used in drawing the…

Discusses two types of compounding formation in Russian and English used in the technical literature of both languages: (1) thematic, where two words are joined with a vowel between them; and (2) athematic, where no vowel is used. An English example of thematic compounding is "electrochemistry"; an athematic example is…

Two experiments examined the structure of rime and status of the coda as a unit in syllables. Found that children had less difficulty learning a word game which kept the final consonant cluster intact than one which broke it up. The more robust type of coda cluster was as coherent a unit as clusters in the onset position. (EAJ)

Addresses "ziji," notorious long-distance reflexive in Chinese, which can take antecedent infinitively far away. Argues that theories concerned with anaphoric properties should be formed and evaluated on basis of following observations: no barriers can block anaphoric relation; and subjects of any clauses containing reflexive are its…

Argues in favor of a syntactic analysis of secondary predication and against the semantic approach to predication. Most of the evidence to be adduced comes from Spanish. It is posited that secondary predicates are base-generated inside VP in Spanish, confirming Culicover and Wilken's (1984) and Robert's (1988) analysis for English. (40 references)…

Examines the so-called internally headed relative construction in Japanese, with particular focus on new data that involve quantificational noun phrases and wh-phrases. Data provide arguments for representations in which the internal head remains internal at LF, and it is also shown that the interpretation of this construction involves E-type…

Attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. (Author/VWL)

Offers an examination of the distributional range of causative verbs. Contrary to research claiming these verbs have highly circumscribed distributions, demonstrates that they readily appear in a wide variety of argument structure frames. The appearance of accusative verbs with omitted patient arguments is analyzed in detail and an account is…

Examines the constraints on depictive predicates and their interpretation within the aspectual structure theory of structural representation of aspect. This model allows a simple expression of the relation between the depictive adjunct predicate and its host by means of a parallel-structures analysis. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle "de" in the history of Chinese. Argues that grammaticalization is subject to influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. (Author/VWL)

Theoretical and empirical research on argument and argumentation in science education has intensified over the last two decades. The term argument in this review refers to the artifacts that a student or a group of students create when asked to articulate and justify claims or explanations whereas the term argumentation refers to the process of…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…

In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds…