Patterns of language are usually perceived, learned and used as meaningful chunks that are processed as a whole, resulting in a reduced learning burden and increased fluency. The ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together is an important part of language acquisition. This paper…

Discusses two readings of English plural noun phrases, the collective and distributive, and argues against postulating a hidden operator that would handle the ambiguity. The article postulates principles of combination, giving truth conditions for a sentence with an "n"-place predicate and demonstrative noun phrases as arguments,…

Developing the ability to speak in a foreign language is an arduous task. This is because it involves the mastery of different language subsystems, simultaneous focus on comprehension and production, and the impact of a range of social factors. This challenge is further compounded in situations in which learners have limited access to the target…

Presents phrases and structures quoted from Melanesian families of the St-Louis tribe in New Caledonia. The system of preverbal markers in Tayo is not well developed and is subject to fluctuation. The use of preverbal markers does not follow the Tempus-Modus-Aspekt rules. (five references) (Author/JP)

Fixed prepositional phrases of the type in this way and on the other hand are used in written and spoken English to connect sentences into larger units (text, dialogues). German prefers simple adverbials like so. Appended is a check-list of the most common such phrases in English and possible German equivalents.

This article focuses on the development of vocabulary among English language learners. The author first defines what a "word" means, then discusses five aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Drawing on Swain (1993), the author identifies three main goals of vocabulary learning. The rest of the article is devoted to the description of six…

The development of a new grammar of English for machine translation systems at Weidner Communications Corporation is described. Although the project began with the intention of simply modifying the grammar rules already in use in the translation system, the reorganization of the grammar was deemed necessary for providing a principled manner of…

Considers the behavior of certain classes of personal pronouns which have come to be known as clitics, covering the categories of clitic pronouns as special elements, a framework for clitics, stressed clitics, clitic doubling, Piedmontese clitic inversion, subject clitics, clitic clustering, clitic movement, and causative and perception verbs. (CB)

Discusses Prince's (1992) reanalysis of the information status of noun phrases (NPs) into two cross-cutting distinctions, one between NPs denoting entities that are new or old with respect to the discourse and another between NPs denoting entities that, in the speaker's estimation, are new or old with respect to the addressee. (Nine references)…

Describes and illustrates several syntactic constraints on intrasentential pronoun reference, and provides operational examples of Paktus, a system that implements these constraints. An argument is made for the advantages of this system over another particular system that addresses roughly the same phenomena. (GLR)

Describes the use of a particle-led analysis of phrasal verbs to reduce English-as-a-Second-Language students' frustration in learning about phrasal verbs. (Author/CB)

Examines informal Japanese conversations between 16 pairs of same-sex friends to explore the preferred information structure of the intonation unit and the preferred clause structure in terms of the number and type of arguments contained per clause. (Author/VWL)

Describes how a laboratory phonologist might investigate three issues in the analysis of the prosody of signed languages: the internal structure, if any, of the signed syllable, the realization of lexical and phrasal prominence, and the marking of edges. Proposes to investigate the internal structure of the syllable by adapting psycholinguistic…

M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (see record 2002-06215-001) argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a…

Theories of indefinites vary with respect to whether these noun phrases can be treated as quantificational. Although everyone seems to be in agreement that indefinites do not always introduce their own quantificational force, there is widespread disagreement as to whether they ever do. In this article, we present experimental evidence from…