In Spanish, aspectual morphology is a critical element that speakers use to narrate and discuss past events. Previous qualitative accounts have shown that native Spanish-speakers apply past-tense aspectual morphology to verbs in order to distinguish between events viewed as perfective (bounded, discrete events) and imperfective (unbounded,…

This study deals with unplanned terminology development in the subject field of economics within media discourse. It examines how economic terms in Turkish newspapers emerge, are used, and cease. This developmental process is also analyzed through productivity of economic terms and the factors affect them. The subject terms are also analyzed as a…

Purpose: Many typically developing children first use inflections such as "-ed" with verb predicates whose meanings are compatible with the functions of the inflection (e.g., using "-ed" when describing events of brief duration with clear end points, such as "dropped"). This tendency is assumed to be beneficial for…

Three experiments show that, contrary to the current view, comprehenders do not unconditionally deactivate information marked by negation. Instead, they discard negated information when it is functionally motivated. In Experiment 1, comprehenders discarded negated concepts when cued by a topic shift to dampen recently processed information.…

This study investigated whether German participles are retrieved as whole words from lexical storage or whether they are accessed via their morphemic constituents. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular verbs and results from combinations of regular/irregular stems with…

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as…

This article is concerned with the sequence development in acquisition of negation by a Chinese speaker. Frequency analysis is given to show the development of each negative device in each period, and comparison is made with negation in the speech of the second-language learner and with that of first-language learner. Both similarities and…

How might syntactic bootstrapping apply in Turkish, which employs inflectional morphology to indicate grammatical relations and allows argument ellipsis? We investigated whether Turkish speakers interpret constructions differently depending on the number of NPs in the sentence, the presence of accusative case marking and the causative morpheme.…

Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

This article pursues the idea of inferring aspects of phonological underlying forms directly from surface contrasts by looking at optimality theoretic linguistic systems (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). The main result proves that linguistic systems satisfying certain conditions have the faithful contrastive feature property: Whenever 2…

Purpose: The goals of this investigation were to determine whether treatment assists children with specific language impairment (SLI) in the use of grammatical morphemes that mark tense and agreement and whether treatment gains influence the children's use of other, untreated morphemes. Method: Twenty-five children with SLI participated in 96…

Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…

Four experiments support the view of negation as mitigation (Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2004). They show that when irony involves some sizable gap between what is said and what is criticized (He is exceptionally bright said of an idiot), it is rated as highly ironic (Giora, 1995). A negated version of that overstatement (He is not…

The word virus is not normally considered polymorphemic, yet it is clearly both semantically and orthographically related to the word viral. Thus, the subunit vir takes on the role of a bound morpheme. In contrast, the words future and futile also share a subunit (fut), but are semantically unrelated. The reported experiment demonstrates…

This interlanguage pragmatics study of linguistic expressions of affect focuses on how Japanese learners of English may express themselves in an affect-laden speech act of indirect complaint. The English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' data are compared with the baseline data of native speakers of Japanese (JJ) and American English (AA). The…