In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…

Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about "long" vacations, "short" tempers, and "colorful" language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents…

This study investigates the status of nominal functional categories in the Old High German (OHG) "Isidor" and "Tatian" translations and Otfrid's "Evangelienbuch" and the structure of the extended nominal group, including the Noun Phrase (NP) and the functional phrases Determiner Phrase (DP), Case Phrase (KP) and Number Phrase (NumP), which govern…

Right-edge boundary tones have earlier been found to restrict syntactic processing by closing a clause for further integration of incoming words. The role of left-edge intonation, however, has received little attention to date. We show that Swedish left-edge boundary tones selectively facilitate the on-line processing of main clauses, the…

Theories of pronoun resolution often assume that pronouns' referents reside in the immediate discourse context. However, language users regularly produce and comprehend "unheralded pronouns" that violate that assumption. This article provides a taxonomy of unheralded pronouns that makes reference to speakers' and addressees' common ground. Data…

Past research showing a bias towards the larger non-symbolic number by adults and children in line bisection tasks (de Hevia & Spelke, 2009) has been challenged by Gebuis and Gevers, suggesting that area subtended by the stimulus and not number is responsible for the biases. I review evidence supporting the idea that although sensitivity to number…

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage…

Writing is the most difficult skill in English, so most EFL students tend to make errors in writing. In assisting the learners to successfully acquire writing skill, the analysis of errors and the understanding of their sources are necessary. This study attempts to explore the major sources of errors occurred in the writing of EFL students. It…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

The acquisition of linguistic structures that require "perspective-taking" at the level of "message generation" is challenging. We investigate use of "progressive aspect" in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists…

Landau (2000) distinguishes between P(artial) C(ontrol) and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol): PC predicates like hope admit a subset relation between controller and controllee (e.g., "Kim hoped to gather at noon." [controllee = Kim and contextually salient others]); EC predicates like "try" do not (*"Kim tried to gather at…

Conceptual congruency effects are biases induced by an irrelevant conceptual dimension of a task (e.g., location in vertical space) on the processing of another, relevant dimension (e.g., judging words' emotional evaluation). Such effects are a central empirical pillar for recent views about how the mind/brain represents concepts. In the present…

A Monte Carlo study was conducted to examine the accuracy of differential item functioning (DIF) detection using the differential functioning of items and tests (DFIT) method. Specifically, the performance of DFIT was compared using "testwide" critical values suggested by Flowers, Oshima, and Raju, based on simulations involving large numbers of…

Investigations into early vocabulary development, including the timing of the acquisition of nouns, verbs and closed-class words, have produced conflicting results, both within and across languages. Studying vocabulary development in Irish can contribute to this area, as it has potentially informative features such as a VSO word order, and…