Discusses the syntactic properties of participial adjuncts and the relevant general syntactic principles in Eastern Bengali, specifically those responsible for case-assignment, word order, and binding properties. (40 references) (Author/VWL)

Contrasts the hypothetical conditional or "modo potencial" in Spanish with the subsequence conditional. Passages from "El habla de la ciudad de Mexico" and from works by Carballido and Borges are cited as examples. Other grammatical studies of the Spanish conditional are reviewed. (LMO)

Discusses the numerical distribution of the six logically possible orders of the Subject (S), Object (O), and Verb (V) across world languages. It is argued that the semantic relations of S, O, and V are best characterized as three concentric regions; S contained in O and O contained in V. (29 references) (Author/VWL)

This article presents an analysis and review of Ljiljana Progovac's "Negative and Positive Polarity: A Binding Approach" (1994). It concludes that by pushing a syntactic analysis of polarity to, if not beyond, its limits, Progovac has focused attention on the work that remains for any approach to polarity to resolve. Contains 59…

A theme running through much of the functionalist literature in linguistics is that grammatical structure often has an "iconic" motivation. Claims supporting this theme are discounted, and the implications are discussed of iconic relationships in language for the autonomy hypothesis and the evolution of language. (190 references)…

Most recent approaches to language learnability and acquisition have assumed that parameter setting is largely a deductive process. This article develops the thesis that parameter setting is correctly viewed as nondeductive. This approach uses natural selection, as simulated by a genetic algorithm, to simulate parameter setting. (90 references)…

Metalinguistic awareness, one's awareness of and control over one's language, is described; related research is discussed; and studies that have attempted to determine the relationship between metalinguistic awareness and bilingualism are examined. (18 references) (JL)

Argues in favor of a syntactic analysis of secondary predication and against the semantic approach to predication. Most of the evidence to be adduced comes from Spanish. It is posited that secondary predicates are base-generated inside VP in Spanish, confirming Culicover and Wilken's (1984) and Robert's (1988) analysis for English. (40 references)…

Attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. (Author/VWL)

Argues that an adequate theory of codeswitching syntax is one that holds that the actual nature of the switching is relative not only to the language pairs, but also to other situational factors. Suggests that congruence of categories is constructed by bilinguals in a given situation with four alternative outcomes for the given candidate switch:…

Identifies two versions of the question of whether there is a single initial system in the syntax of developing bilinguals. (Author/VWL)

Analyzes the causal relationship between the establishment of the classifier system and the grammaticalization of the morphosyntactic particle "de" in the history of Chinese. Argues that grammaticalization is subject to influence of the overall structural change of a language in a particular period of time. (Author/VWL)

The purpose of this study was to use an age-appropriate version of the sentence-structure priming paradigm (e.g., K. Bock, 1990; K. Bock, H. Loebell, & R. Morey, 1992) to assess experimentally the syntactic processing abilities of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 16 CWS and 16 CWNS between the…

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech…

Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of…