This paper has been written to fall within the orbit of the moraic framework of the syllable, particularly the syllable weight, of Basrah Arabic. Universal as its nature is, mora, when studied and then applied, has, metaphorically speaking, the power of casting its phonological 'spell' over the problems of the morphophonology of Basrah…

Adjuncts and arguments exhibit different syntactic behaviours, but modelling this difference in minimalist syntax is challenging: on the one hand, adjuncts differ from arguments in that they are optional, transparent, and iterable, but on the other hand they are often strictly ordered, reflecting the kind of strict selection seen in argument…

Research on linguistic variation suggests that usage patterns are deeply embedded in native and non-native speakers' knowledge of grammar. This study explores the transfer of these variable sociolinguistic patterns at the initial stages of third language acquisition. We elicited narratives in Portuguese from two mirror-image groups of sequential…

This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

In generative syntax, the theory of asymmetry in syntax has gained much attention due to the influential work of Kayne (1994), who adopts the null hypothesis that syntax is inherently asymmetric. However, such a direction does not seem fully compatible with the general assumptions in Galilean style scientific theories, all of which aspire to…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

In this commentary three aspects of the feature-based model that Lardiere assumes are discussed: the value of formalization in the investigation of second language acquisition, the extent to which native speakers converge on the same grammatical representations, and the length of time it takes to establish a mature native grammar. These factors…

This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from…

Proposes a dynamical systems approach to parsing in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. The experiments discussed documented various contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. (47 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses variation in interlanguage and suggests two hypotheses to explain such variation as multiple internal representations of a form and processing errors. Suggests that second language learners can initially represent new forms as prototype schemas, and that such non-discrete representations are a third source of variation in interlanguage.…

In the past, linguistic descriptions of the relationships common to passive sentences have not been universally applicable. Junction grammar, a type of generative grammar, is a model that may provide a means of describing universal passive relationships. Junction grammar differs from transformational grammar in that its rules (1) claim other…