Presents a unitary rule to account for the phonological content of Irish lenition, one of the Celtic initial mutations. It is proposed that Irish lenition involves linking the autosegmental to the target segment. (39 references) (JL)

Analyzes the case marking structure of Japanese. It is proposed that the Case particle has its projection, the Kase Phrase, and that its head, Kase, receives case and a thematic role from an external source, and assigns them to the noun phrase.(36 references) (JL)

Presents the case for treating the "ba" construction in Mandarin Chinese as a verb, considering both language-internal arguments and arguments from universal properties of parts of speech. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the distinction between two verb types in French, suggesting that the distinction is of a fundamentally semantic, not syntactic, nature. A reexamination of the treatment given these verbs in a previous analysis is recommended. (MSE)

Attempts to resolve an outstanding question as to the most appropriate structural description of the relationship between subject and verb in Bislama (a Melanesian creole spoken in Vanuatu), discusses what the implications of this analysis might be for a Creole ontogeny, and attempts to unify this analysis to the verb system with the distribution…

Examines the history of a construction from later Old English by comparing two approaches to its analysis, one functional and one formal. Both analyses are internally consistent and, at the same time, vulnerable to criticism from both the inside and the outside. (Author/VWL)

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

Proposes an account of linking patterns that does away with intermediary mechanisms such as thematic or actor/undergoer hierarchies. Shows that the generalizations a linking theory needs to capture can be modeled via the same mechanisms as other lexical generalizations, using conditions specified within the hierarchy of word classes. (Author/VWL)

Outlines the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, tests are developed for distinguishing these two clause types. A range of exclamative structures is then presented. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on unusual developmental structures during the simultaneous acquisition of German and English in early childhood, which were evident parallel to a majority of target structures. Explains the cognitive motivation for unusual acquisition structures as well as the eventual retraction from them. (Author/VWL)

In two experiments, we tested for lingering effects of "verb replacement" disfluencies on the processing of garden path sentences that exhibit the main verb/reduced relative (MV/RR) ambiguity. Participants heard sentences with revisions like "The little girl chosen, uh, selected for the role celebrated with her parents and friends". We found that…

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as…

Tested was the hypothesis that a sequential, linguistically-oriented program of instruction in written sentence structure and in the relationships between written and oral sentences will produce significantly greater achievement in sentence construction than the traditional English program. Nine classrooms of students (grades 3-5) participated in…

This work reports on an initial study of the possibility of providing a suitable framework for the teaching of a foreign language grammar through string analysis, using French as the target language. Analysis of a string word list (word-class sequences) yields an overall view of the grammar. Details are furnished in a set of restrictions which…

Although linguistic analysis is only indirectly useful for language teaching, it is directly useful to the language teacher. What language teachers hope to gain from linguistic studies are insights into the language and how it works and functions, so that they can make use of this information when formulating teaching techniques. With this…