Reviews the properties and consequences of the Principle of Contrast. It is argued that this principle accounts for the acquisition of irregular forms in morphology and that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of allomorphy. (62 references) (GLR)

Discusses the automatic construction of abstracts from the texts of documents. Automatic sentence extraction is examined, including syntactic criteria and semantic relational criteria; textual cohesion is discussed, including the recognition of anaphors and noun phrases; text structure is addressed; and the concept of abstract-frames is described.…

Investigates whether patient animacy affected the acquisition of the passive construction of syntax of 32 children aged two-five years. Results indicate that children who were taught the passive with animate patients produced more passives in the teaching phase than did comparable children who received inanimate patients. (RJC)

Presents examples of how children acquire language through the principles-and-parameters model, a highly modular system in which different theories interact so that only permissible sequences arise, and highlights research on Spanish syntax and semantics. (136 references) (CB)

The study of four autistic children, aged six-nine, found support for the hypothesis that persistent pronominal errors by autistic children can be explained by failure to observe pronouns in speech addressed to another person, an aspect of language development in normal children. (Author/DB)

Explores how an anthropological perspective provides a necessary basis for an account of several aspects of the language acquisition process. Discussion focuses on how the patterns of development in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics appear to be profoundly influenced by the range of adult language structures. (Author/CB)

This paper examines the syntax of imperative sentences in languages in which imperative verbs have distinctive morphology. Imperative verbs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish) or distribute like other verbs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root…

Argues that the late acquisition of the third-person singular agreement affix /-s/ in second-language learners of English is the result of a syntactic configuration that makes the ending appear ungrammatical to the learner of English while allowing agreement inflection to appear when the target language has a more robust agreement model, as in the…

This study of early word learning focused on the status of object words in early vocabularies. Fourteen children were followed from nine months to two years of age, and monthly vocabulary growth was analyzed. Results indicated that object words represented approximately one-third, on average, of the different words the children learned. (TJQ)

Examined thematic and grammatical role categories accessible to preschool children and how access to these categories changes with age. Results of three experiments with children and adults confirmed the psychological reality of certain semantic categories, and provided evidence suggesting a transition in the prominence of semantic relative to…

Attempts to formulate an appropriate linguistic generalization for the occurrence of inhibited periodic eyeblinking by fluent American Sign Language (ASL) signers. It is shown that signers' eyeblinks are sensitive to syntactic structure, from which intonational phrases may be derived. (19 references) (MDM)

The nature of scrambling in Japanese is examined in light of the work of Webelhuth and Mahajan, and it is argued that their apparently inconsistent hypotheses are both necessary for the analysis of scrambling. A modified version is suggested. (59 references) (Author/LB)

Reports on an analysis of the forms, strategies, and functions of complimenting in one genre of written discourse. It is argued that writers use complimenting discourse strategies to establish and maintain rapport and to mitigate both global and genre-specific face-threatening acts and that these social purposes help account for both their…

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

The goal of this paper is to explore the ramifications of a nontraditional view of cognition and social interaction for the study of grammatical structure. (Contains 77 references.) (JL)