Mainly concerned with where negative questions in Chinese originate.An abstract treatment allows the derviation of all questions from a general underlying structure with disjunctive pattern and accounts for the discordance between the answer to a negative question and its answer particle. (Author/RM)

The difficulty with "le" involves some seeming inconsistencies in the formation of negatives and the identification of its functions. The suggested solution consists of explaining the use of the semantic properties of the verbs involved, co-occurrence restriction with negative markers, and the relative postion of "le" in the surface structure.…

The research reported is part of an investigation into the acquisition of grammar, using nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Three children were seen for approximately 8 hours, every 6 weeks, in their homes, from the age of 19 months--soon after the earliest…