The progression through the developmental stages of the acquisition of interrogatives was analyzed. Data on use of the "what" interrogative were collected during play sessions from eight children at six-month intervals from the ages of 1;6 to 3 years. More than 2,400 children's interrogatives were recorded. It was demonstrated that…

An examination focuses on several instances in which consonant mutation, whereby the initial consonant of a word or constituent undergoes morphophonological changes, occurs in standard literary Welsh. The syntactic and morphological means by which these mutations take place are considered, with emphasis on how an account of these mutations fits…

This experiment was designed to investigate the possibility that young children use syntax to constrain and focus verb meanings in their interpretations of novel scenes and novel verbs. Subjects were 24 children, 12 males and 12 females, of 23 to 27 months, all raised in English-speaking homes. Their mean productive vocabulary was 240 words. A…

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

The Pennsylvania German (PG) linguistic situation offers a unique insight into the mechanisms of language change, and specifically of syntactic change. Pennsylvania German consists of two primary varieties, (Plain (PPG) and Nonplain (NPG), a distinction based on the Anabaptist socioreligious affiliations of the former group that has produced two…

A discussion of Leonard Bloomfield's theory on grammatical agreement examines agreement within Bloomfield's overall scheme of syntactic analysis and relates it to current work in syntax. Bloomfield's three types of agreement (concord, government, and cross-reference) are outlined and compared to the contemporary distinction between pro-drop and…

A symposium on discourse analysis and language learning is summarized. Discourse analysis can be divided into six fields of research: syntax, the amount of syntactic organization required for different types of discourse, large speech events, intra-sentential cohesion in text, speech acts, and unequal power discourse. Research on speech events and…

To integrate many of the theoretical linguistic studies examining pronoun reference, this paper focuses on tracing the shift from purely transformational syntactic studies of intrasentential phenomena to the wider orientations of discourse and pragmatic studies. The first section describes the classic studies of pronominalization within the…

The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…

Argues that elementary reading materials should reflect the advanced syntax already evident in the language patterns of most youngsters. (RB)

Language samples were gathered from two children, from several weeks after the first birthday of each child to the beginning of the child's two-word period (approximately 10 months). The children were observed and videotaped every two weeks, to obtain 33 continuous minutes of tape. Analyses focused on the question of whether or not the child uses…

Second in a series of articles with the same title. This one deals specifically with verb aspect in Russian. Verbs are divided into two groups; the active and the effective. (Text is in German.) (TL)

This article points out the contrast that exists both at the morphological and syntactic levels between affirmative and negative sentences in Hindi. This contrast and the structural changes related to it are discussed with specific reference to simple and compound sentences, interrogative sentences and specific elements within sentences. (CLK)