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…

The development and testing of textual analysis procedures using Mexican-Spanish and Papago texts as a phase of a study of method in language and culture research are described in this research report. These procedures, which are designed to allow the examination of informational structure and cognitive content, (1) segment uniformized texts into…

This bibliography, compiled as an aid to linguists working in contrastive structure studies, is an expanded version of one published in March 1960. One hundred and sixty-six studies printed in the roman alphabet are listed, as well as 37 studies printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. The broad scope of subject coverage includes many documents which…

This book discusses the relevance of applied linguistics to foreign language teaching and supports the point of view that linguistics is relevant as the source of assumptions rather than as the source of conclusions. In foreign language teaching, the assumptions based on linguistics must ultimately be evaluated on their ability to explain the…

This document describes how the main principles of Perspective Text Analysis are implemented in the PC-system PERTEX, concentrating on the main steps of the analysis. The analysis starts with normal text and ends in a topological representation of the mentality that the text presents. The text material is processed in the following main steps: (1)…

The allophonic variation in the quality of the resonant consonants of two Missouri River (Siouan) languages, Crow and Hidatsa, has not previously been studied adequately. Evidence is provided in this paper that /m/ and /n/ are the best representations for the underlying resonants in Hidatsa as well as Crow and Proto-Missouri River. Establishing…

A special word, "naynaa," which occurs in the Jamul dialect of Diegueno, a Yuman language spoken in the San Diego, California, area is described. Jamul has subject-object-verb word order, and its major word classes are noun and verb. Lexical pronouns are not required. Clauses may be connected by means of switch reference marking, and/or…

The three papers in this publication analyze a newspaper article on "economic politics," or more specifically, the devaluing of the Danish kroner. The papers all examine some linguistic or structural feature of the language used in writing the article. Specific focus is on relevance theory and relevance in the article, the use of text…

Two types of causative constructions in Korean behave differently both syntactically and semantically. This paper presents the syntactic differences between syntactic causative constructions and morphological causative constructions in terms of merger process of argument structures, and in the Case assignment in the two constructions in terms of…

This study explores sound-symbolic, or mimetic, words in the Japanese language, the majority of which are never entered in Japanese dictionaries, and which may not be fully understood in all their nuances by native speakers. The extensiveness of the sound-symbolic system is related to the semantic under-differentiation of Japanese verbs. An…

The syllabic structure in the Hmongic language, Hmu (spoken by nearly one million people), is examined, based on the dialect of Hmu spoken in the town of Yanghao in the Southeast Guizhou Miao-Dong Autonomous District of southern China. The discussion is based entirely on data presented by Wang (1979). From the examination, two rules with the…

A sentence such as "I am going to find the store" may be reduced to "I[ma]find the store." This reduction consists of a reduction of the auxiliary, changing "I am" to "I'm," and an adjunction of infinitival "to" onto "going" to derive "gonna." From there, "gonna" is…

A study examines evidence concerning whether Amazonian languages have moved historically from earlier ergative-absolutive systems to nominative-accusative or mixed systems, or whether the change has been in the other direction. The main focus is on the Cariban language family. After a review of relevant literature, data from three of these…

An analysis of pronouns in Proto-Algic, the ancestor of Proto-Algonquian and other languages, revealed that the Proto-Algic demonstrative roots and locatives had three inflectional endings, referring to spatial or temporal distributions of entities, which evolve into the gender systems of Yurok and Algonquian. Proto-Algic had two discourse…

In an anniversary tribute to Paul Diderichsen, this report suggests that the theories and analyses put forth by Diderichsen in 1935 are central to both the general and empirical research on the Germanic languages. Particular emphasis is placed on the proposal to analyze the "verb-second-analysis" phenomenon in Germanic languages.…