Discusses the differences in power among people of all societies, which are reflected by pronoun usage (or other grammatical indications) or, in the case of English, by some other linguistic means. Since English can no longer distinguish solidarity and power by means of pronouns, it relies on the use of first names and titles to accomplish the…

Supports use of multiple paradigms for the measurement of individual differences in the search for explanations of natural language. Rather than a single paradigm discipline, they offer a wider scope of inquiry--phenomena of interest, types of questions, and forms of explanations, as well as opening the discipline to inspiration and analogy from…

English- and Japanese-speaking children aged four and five were asked to say the opposite of statements. Statements varied in truth value and unmarked/marked membership of antonym pairs. Findings did not support a universality hypothesis; differences were found between the two groups in the use of semantic and syntactic denial. (Author/CB)

Cross cultural comparisons of the underlying psychological structures of 20 kinship terms for 17 selected language/culture communities were investigated. An evaluation was made of the technique used. (Author/RM)

This book is a concise history of structural linguistics, charting its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists, a language is a self-contained and tightly organized system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This…

Examines Japanese equivalents of the six mental predicates defined as semantic universals in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, with special attention to syntax and semantics of complementation types. It is shown that each primitive predicate has a specific set of syntactic frames for expressing primitive meaning and that extended meanings that…

Explores the combinatorial possibilities of semantic primitives of time and space in French, as defined in the theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Highlights the need for new ways to express the allolexical relationship in some combinations, particularly those expressing "when/time." (Author/MSE)

Revisits Felix's (1988) and Birdsong's (1994) theories regarding universal grammar. Birdsong's criticism of Felix is upheld by consideration of a statistical model of the data. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the minimal requirements that any serious theory of language acquisition must meet, including the particular properties of the human language processor and linguistic and nonlinguistic input. A review of literature regarding the role of Universal Grammar in second-language acquisition suggests alternative theories to investigate for…

This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…

Evidence that native language acquisition is possible because children are born with an innate language faculty--universal grammar (UG)--is considerable. In second language acquisition by older learners, this notion is less clear. Discusses the poverty of stimulus phenomena (POS) in relation to this, and argues that while POS phenomena are…

In this experimental study, we focus on the following semantic universal: if a habitual clause reading, then generic pronominal subject; if an episodic clause reading, then specific pronominal subject. We argue that although this set of two conditionals is a universal property of all natural languages, English-speaking second-language (L2)…

This examination focuses on the idea that child language acquisition is constrained by the same principles that have been found to hold on syllable structure across languages. First, a recently-proposed constraint on syllable structure, the Sonority Cycle, is outlined, and the way that it accounts for syllabic structure across languages is…