A study investigating the acquisition of empty categories (ECs) in Sinhala, a language of the Indo-Aryan family spoken in Sri Lanka, is reported in part. The results examined here concern ECs occurring in a subset of adverbial clause types differing with regard to the kinds of null subjects they permit, including those obligatorily coindexed,…

Case marking strategies in Kope, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea, are analyzed in light of previous claims that most Papuan languages have one strategy for marking core relations and another for marking peripheral relations. A brief grammatical overview illustrates how core and peripheral relations are marked in Kope, including nominal case…

An analysis of Hebrew topicalization looks at the normal or unmarked function of topicalization in narrative discourse and considers the additional contextual effects that marked or apparently redundant instances of topicalization are intended to achieve. Focus is on the fronting of elements in sentences with topic-comment articulation. It is…

A study investigated the acquisition of the phonemic feature/voice/ and, more specifically, voice onset time (VOT), in Hindi and English. Subjects were 20 monolingual children aged 2 to 6 from each of the 2 language groups, divided into 5 age groups, and 10 adults from each language group. Flash cards depicting minimally contrasting sets of words,…

A study of tone and accent in Qafar, a Cushitic language characterized by tonal rather than stress accent, modifies an earlier claim made about the relationship between accent and gender. The newer study makes a proposal that simplifies the account of gender in that this category is seen as determined rather than determining. This further suggests…

Persian language instructors at U.S. universities were surveyed regarding (1) their methods for measuring Persian language proficiency among American undergraduate students, (2) research verifying the validity and reliability of these methods, and (3) their definitions of Persian language proficiency. A 12-item questionnaire was completed by 17…

A discussion of the nature and process of phonological changes taking places in languages looks specifically at the merging of allophones and the reorganization of phonemes in response to pressures within the phonological system. The hypotheses of economy and reorganization are used to analyze the process of change within a phonological system.…

The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic…

A study of Dogrib, an Athapascan language, focuses on long-distance agreement in the case of reflexives. While this "control" relationship has generally been considered in the context of infinitives, it is proposed that evidence from long distance agreement in Dogrib indicates that control is also relevant for languages without…

A discussion of pragmatics looks at and compares a variety of statement types in Macedonian and French. Based on the assumption that the most important semantic and syntactic elements are presented by the speakers themselves as well as by the temporal and spatial markers, the function of the statement form is examined. Focus is on the use of the…

Metathesis, usually described in descriptive or historical linguistics as sporadic change, is investigated as a systematic phonological change using data from Gascon, an Occitan dialect. In the first chapter, the controversy over metathesis as a phonological change is presented and discussed from the standpoint of historical development. In…

The properties of presupposition were investigated in Japanese and English. The investigation examined how the presupposition is preserved under different syntactic structures, and identified presupposition in terms of the transitivity of factive verbs. Japanese was seen as more clearly manifesting "presuppositionability" than English in…

An analysis of stress and intonation patterns in Swedish is presented in the context of lexical phonology. The theories of lexical, metrical, and autosegmental phonology are outlined, and a brief review of Swedish stress and tone patterns is presented. The nature of Swedish stress, the interaction of stress rules with length and morphology, the…

Little is known about the transition from the use of Latin to the use of German in scientific literature. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Latin texts by Albrecht Durer and Johannes Kepler were bestsellers while the German versions were unpopular. German mathematics became acceptable only after 1700, with the work of Christian Wolff.…

An analysis of the Dinka (Sudan) vowel system consists of: (1) an overview of Dinka phonological structure, including the phonological sentence, the phonological word, the syllable, and the consonantal and vocalic features of the sound system; (2) an examination of breathy versus nonbreathy vowels, including a review of previous research using a…