Argues against Edward Sapir's pronouncement that English has no infixes by pointing to the insertion of certain interjections into other words (fan-damn-tastic, abso-bloody-lutely) and the morpheme "ma" in vaguely definable words such as thingamabob and whatchamacallit. Possible etymologies of such vaguely defined words are also…

Investigates deverbal nominalization involving the suffix "kake" in Japanese. Argues that kake nominalization induces two different meanings, the halfway and the inception reading, and different constraints are called for depending on these two meanings. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the distribution of existential polarity wh-phrases (EPWs) in Chinese that behave like negative polarity items, examining the distribution of Chinese EPWs and arguing that using EPWs is felicitous if the local propositions in which they appear do not entail existence of a referent satisfying the EPW description. The paper considers…

Explores categorization of verbs according to lexical aspectual meaning. Any type of categorization confronts a difficulty in suffixing "-teiru" to the verb "you-" because the "-teiru" suffixation actually yields a verb phrase to ambiguity. Suggests that the difficulty can be resolved by taking into account the…

Discusses indexing methods in Korean text retrieval and proposes a new indexing method based on n-grams which can handle compound nouns effectively without dictionaries and complex linguistic knowledge. Experimental results show that n-gram-based indexing is considerably faster than morpheme-based indexing, and also provides better retrieval…

Develops an argument for a pied-piping approach to the apparent absence of island effects in Japanese, along the lines of Nishigauchi (1986, 1990). Investigates the nature of pied-piping, developing a theory that accounts for the fact that wh-islands cannot be pied-piped. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence that argument structure is not a semantic but a syntactic level of representation. Evidence is based on the distinction between primary and secondary objects found in languages such as Chichewa. Concludes that because argument structure must express the distinction between primary and secondary objects, it follows that argument…

Shows how the subject pronoun in a cleft sentence together with the cleft clause function pragmatically as a discontinuous definite description. Presents a new syntactic analysis of clefts, which treats the cleft clause as an extraposed complement of the cleft subject pronoun, adjoined to the clefted constituent. (Author/VWL)

This study reports on functional morpheme (I, D, and C) production in the spontaneous speech of five pairs of children who have undergone hemispherectomy, matching each pair for etiology and age at symptom onset, surgery, and testing. Our results show that following left hemispherectomy (LH), children evidence a greater error rate in the use of…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

This study examines how Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) intersects with the typological characteristics of Korean in the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs). Korean has two types of RC constructions: head-external and head-internal. The head-external relative has its head to the right of the RC, whereas the…

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

In 1941, Angeline Williams, an Anishinaabe elder taught the Ojibwa (Chippewa) language to a class at the Linguistic Institute at the University of North Carolina. Ojibwa is an American Indian language which was spoken as a chain of dialects in numerous communities from Quebec across the Great Lakes and into the plains of Saskatchewan. This text…

A 2-year study of optimal structures for multimedia instruction is being conducted to provide experimentally validated guidelines for the design of computer-based instruction generation systems and for human instruction in a multimedia setting. In order to obtain for analysis a significant range of the possible discourse structures that occur in…