Discusses the current approaches to interlanguage syntax, focusing on the goal of finding consistency and pattern in syntactic variation. Some themes contributing to descriptive approaches include: the transition from morphosyntax acquisition studies to those of more complex syntax, the emergence of syntax from discourse, explicitness, and the…

Research on which portions of this study are based was performed under a National Science Foundation Grant and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. (VM)

Semantic primitives for time and space, as proposed in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, are examined for lexical equivalents in Hong Kong Cantonese. Temporal primitives are all found to have clear Cantonese exponents that can be combined as predicted with other metalanguage elements, with two exceptions. Spatial primitives all appear to have…

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

The arguments for and against viewing the child's initial one-word utterances as holophrases are reviewed. An alternative view of early language development, which takes the speech act as the basic unit of linguistic communication, rather than the sentence, is offered as a solution to the holophrase controversy. (Author/RM)

This issue is devoted to language universals and consists of 4 papers. "Zulu Nominal Modification - An Outline," by A. Johnston, discusses modifiers in Zulu and their relation to nominals. "Shape Classifiers and Natural Categories," by S.G. Pulman, discusses the role of the dimension of "shape" in language…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of coordination reduction in various languages and to propose a universal set of rules that will account for all types of coordination reduction. In a brief discussion of some of the more recent proposals on coordination reduction it will be shown that these proposals fail to account for the…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how languages express contrastive emphasis. It is argued that all contrastively emphasized constructions have underlying cleft sentences, independent of whether the surface structure is an equational or a nonequational one. It is furthermore argued that emphatic word orders are systematic and predictable…

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

Response to Robert A. Hall, Jr.'s article, "Why a Structural Semantics Is Impossible," Language Sciences, n21. (DD)

Revised version of a paper supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. The universal base hypothesis states that all natural languages utilize the same base component in their transformational grammars. (DD)

Recognition criteria refer to those features which enable the analyst to recognize the item he attempts to ascertain through his elicitation procedure. (DD)

Identifies lexical equivalents of semantic primitives "above, under, inside, on the side," as defined by Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, in Longgu (Solomon Islands) and argues that the first three have both a semantically primitive rational sense and a secondary topological sense. Morphosyntactic issues are discussed, including…

Presents evidence for a theory that children learning Russian at a certain age know a syntactic principle that governs the distribution of pronouns, but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle that restricts the situations in which noun phrases may be contraindexed. (Contains 48 references.) (JP)