"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

Previous research on the L1 acquisition of motion event expression suggests that mapping multiple semantic components onto syntactic units is associated with greater difficulties in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages, because the former require more complex structures (using subordination). This study investigated the impact of this…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

Poverty of the stimulus has been at the heart of ferocious and tear-filled debates at the nexus of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy for decades. This review is intended as a guide for readers without a formal linguistics or philosophy background, focusing on what poverty of the stimulus is and how it's been interpreted, which is…

In this article, I argue that first language (L1), second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition are fundamentally the same process, based on learning by parsing. Both child and adult learners are sensitive to fine linguistic distinctions, and language development takes place in small steps. While the bulk of the article focuses on…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

The induction problems facing language learners have played a central role in debates about the types of learning biases that exist in the human brain. Many linguists have argued that some of the learning biases necessary to solve these language induction problems must be both innate and language-specific (i.e., the Universal Grammar (UG)…

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our…

This article is concerned with the correspondence conditions that hold between certain semantic relations--including part-whole relations, possession, location, and the semantic features [+- animate] or [+- count]--and certain syntactic structures including genitives and relative clauses. The objective is to determine the extent to which these…

Provides new evidence from Spanish and English self-paced reading experiments on relative clause attachment sites. Suggests that a principle like Late Closure is universally operative in the human parser. Proposes that a second factor is the principle of Predicate Proximity. Discusses the origins and predictions of the theory combining these two…

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

Edward Sapir's 1921 publication, "Language, An Introduction to the Study of Speech" is interpreted for beginning students of historical and descriptive linguistics. In his book, Sapir attempts to show (1) what he thinks language is, (2) what variables occur in language due to time and place, and (3) the relationship of language and…

Studies were conducted to help determine criteria for describing the stages through which second language learners pass as they acquire a new language. The ability of 24 beginning adult students of English as a second language to supply ten morphemes in obligatory contexts was predicted on the basis of contrastive analysis between English and each…