In an attempt to determine some of the shared phonological traits among Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest, this paper compares the sound systems of Pueblo languages. The languages within the scope of this research are Zuni, Keresan (Acoma and Santa Ana), and Tanoan (Sandia, Taos, Jemez, and Santa Clara). It is noted that Pueblo Indians have…

An analysis of the phonological phenomenon of "isinkalakahliso" or palatalization in Xhosa, a Bantu language, is presented, focusing on its occurrence in the passive form of verbs. First, earlier theories about the phenomenon are discussed and compared, and a new analysis is offered. It is concluded that this conceptualization of…

In a study of English auxiliary verb usage, it is proposed that this category of verbs share a characteristic that explains some idiosyncracies: they do not show morphosyntactic inflectional irregularities. According to this account, the relationship between auxiliaries and full verbs is distant, and the morphosyntactic categories that auxiliaries…

A special issue of the journal, dedicated to Henry B. Kahane, the late founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Champaign, celebrates the department's first 25 years. It contains three parts. The first consists of specifically commissioned papers originally written in 1973-74 and meant for a specific project,…

A study examines evidence concerning whether Amazonian languages have moved historically from earlier ergative-absolutive systems to nominative-accusative or mixed systems, or whether the change has been in the other direction. The main focus is on the Cariban language family. After a review of relevant literature, data from three of these…

A study examined the presence or absence of the article with proper names for people in the Bible's book of Acts, using four categories of description, including: (1) the unmarked patterns involving the first mention of a participant and further references to the participant in the same incident; (2) the reintroduction of participants after an…

A study investigated the order of acquisition of inflectional morphology in English within morphemes, focusing on late acquisition of one allomorph of the plural. It is proposed that late acquisition is rooted in the operation of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which states that at the melodic level, adjacent identical elements are…

An analysis of pronouns in Proto-Algic, the ancestor of Proto-Algonquian and other languages, revealed that the Proto-Algic demonstrative roots and locatives had three inflectional endings, referring to spatial or temporal distributions of entities, which evolve into the gender systems of Yurok and Algonquian. Proto-Algic had two discourse…

Two studies investigated how flexible children are when asked to switch from one semantic interpretation to another. Three distinctly different standards for the adjectives "big" and "little" were examined: normative, perceptual, and functional. The first study looked at whether some standards are harder than others to represent and whether…

Two studies addressed the relative strengths of object kind bias and syntactic knowledge in 2-year-olds' inductions of word meaning. The study looked at children's interpretations of novel proper names for familiar and unfamiliar objects. In each study, 10 children were assigned to each of 2 conditions (familiar and unfamiliar) and shown 2 cats…

A model of the child's learning of the past tense forms of English verbs is discussed. This connectionist model takes as input a present-tense verb and provides as output a past tense form. A new simulation is applied to 13 problems raised by critics of the model, presented as fundamental flaws in the conceptualizations underlying connectionism.…

A study tested the validity of a theory of count/mass syntax in word learning. The theory proposes that children infer one of two procedures, depending on whether the referent is an object or a non-solid substance. Subjects were 36 2-year-olds, divided according to three experimental conditions. All were taught a novel word with reference to…

The nature of semantic roles and grammatical relations are explored from the perspective of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). It is proposed that unraveling the relational aspects of grammar involves the recognition that semantic roles fall into two types, thematic relations and macroroles, and that grammatical relations are not universal and are…

Two hypotheses related to the emergence of multiword speech were explored: (1) that multiword speech follows developments in children's ability to map communicative intents to single-word expressions; and (2) that the acquisition of these mapping principles paves the way for the emergence of syntax. The developments consist of an increase in the…

A system of quantitative techniques for describing the English language from a number of perspectives, intended for the language analyst, is presented. The grammar combines an emerging knowledge of semantics with existing detailed knowledge of syntax. The primary unit of analysis is the predication, a group of related concepts expressed as a…