This article proposes an explanation for the use of resumptives in child language based on the feature of the nominal system. A cross-linguistic comparison shows no significant difference in resumptive use between child French, child English, and child Spanish. (50 references) (JL)

Details six major research findings regarding second-language acquisition, including transitional stages for acquiring syntax; fixed-order emergence of grammatical morphemes; language acquisition progress from unmarked to marked elements; first-language influence; rule-governed learner output; and learner access to input. (27 references) (CB)

One possible criticism of formal syntactic theory is that it is based on a philosophy and a set of metaphors that appear superseded even in the physical sciences where they were developed. Borrowing again from the physical sciences, this paper argues for linguistic theory with a philosophical basis in interrelatedness. (39 references) (Author/VWL)

Provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the CECIL computer hardware and software package to analyze 28 right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse. It was found that, although right-dislocations appear to fulfill various functional roles in discourse, no correlation appears…

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

Ways in which the notion of causation is expressed in written British English are examined in a study that collected 130 different expressive devices. The use of causative conjunctions was found to be the most frequent of eight major ways of marking causation, closely followed by causative adverbs. (21 references) (Author/LB)

Investigates semantic and contextual similarity for pairs of nouns that vary from high to low semantic similarity. An inverse relationship between similarity of meaning and the discriminability of contexts is demonstrated. It is concluded that the more often two words can be substituted, the more similar in meaning they are judged to be. (33…

The studies presented here represent an attempt to determine which of several alterations to the input directed to second-language learners affect comprehensibility. The first study manipulated both speed and syntax, and the second study examined the introduction of pauses into the input. (JL)

The goal of this special issue on Interfaces is to explore the division of labor between pragmatics and grammar. In the introductory paper a system of different modules and interface mappings has been presented. Some suggestions were made where the job of the acquisition process is. It was posed that most, if not all, acquisition is in the mapping…

We examine the time-course of semantic structure formation during real-time sentence comprehension. We do this through the lens of aspectual coercion, a semantic combinatorial operation that lacks morpho-syntactic reflections, yet is indispensable for sentence interpretation. We describe two experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the results of a…

Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…

An analysis of the English lexical items "even" and "only" looks at features of their behavior in discourse and brings attention to certain unexamined aspects of their role in text. Their syntactic behavior is reviewed and some problems with previous interpretations are examined. The features of "even" are defined:…

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…

Patients with cortical lesions, both with or without aphasia, were asked to reconstruct sentences. It was found that syntactic comprehension deficits exist only in aphasics. Two groups are distinguishable, those with deficits due to problems of repetition and those with deficits due to problems of object recognition. (Text is in French.) (TL)