This paper identifies a feature of human brain neural nets that may be described as the principle of ease of processing (PEP), and that, it is argued, is the primary force guiding a learner towards a target grammar. It is suggested that the same principle lies at the heart of Optimality Theory, which characterizes the course of language…

The study of the spontaneous generation of a pidgin by two children, five and six years old, to accommodate their communication needs when neither had fully acquired his native language, is described. The children were an African native of a Swahili-speaking family and an American child living in the African village. The new language created was a…

In a comparison of the melodies in the speech of Mandarin Chinese and Caucasian American mothers, striking similarities were found: (1) in the overall distribution and average structure of melodic contours; (2) in close contextual links to given forms of intuitive parental care; and (3) in a tendency to neglect lexical tones in favor of pitch…

The paper demonstrates how contrastive linguistics may receive a fresh breath of life from approaching certain problems from the cognitive linguistic point of view. Cognitive linguistics is not only capable of providing contrastive linguistics with a comprehensive but coherent theoretical backbone the latter has always badly needed for its…

These papers deal with a variety of topics bearing on modality in a variety of languages and language families. While all languages have ways of expressing modality, that is, such notions as possibility, necessity, and contingency, this phenomenon has been the object of little systematic linguistic analysis. These papers are presented with the…

The liberty of deviation from the dominant word order in Esperanto and the natural languages is considered. Greenberg's classification of the languages according to four criteria, the liberty of word order in Sanskrit, and the norm of grammaticality in a constructed language are considered. Objection is made to St. Clair's argument that word order…

At a meeting in November 1966, sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, members of public and private organizations were briefed on the state of linguistics and what it has to offer other disciplines: (1) its basic unity despite organizational diversity; (2) its breadth, as the science of verbal structure, and how it relates to all…

Observation of child language development is just one way to study how language changes over time. Developmental psycholinguistics shares much common ground with historical linguistics and with studies of languages in contact and the evolution of pidgins and creoles. By studying the way language changes, this paper focuses on clarifying the…

This paper explores the syntactic properties, in Romanian, of one kind of subordination, namely Sentential Predicate Complementation. Some generalizations are offered concerning the relationship between the meaning and the syntactic properties of these constructions. The complement structures are isolated into groups according to verb selection:…

The following conference papers are included here: (1) "Language Typology and Contrastive Linguistics," by Laszlo Dezso and William Nemser, summarizes the history of typology and discusses the application of typology to research on language acquisition. (2) "Contrastive Aspects of British and American English with Implications for…

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…

Sixteen Mexican-American 4-year-olds, classified as culturally disadvantaged, were administered a special program in an attempt to teach them the concept of adjectival comparatives in a short time. The children were divided into two treatment groups. One, the inductive or "discovery" group, was shown a picture of an object (for example,…

The basis for understanding the origin, development, and behavior of language is presented in this introduction to linguistic science. Aspects of language that link linguistics to anthropology, social studies, and mathematics are examined. Major emphasis is on phonetics and phonemics, historical considerations, vocabulary, and semantic change.…

This paper presents evidence from Philippine languages which suggests a number of modifications in the theory of case grammar. Philippine languages and adjacent related languages mark the case relationship between the verb and one noun phrase in the sentence by a particle on the noun phrase and an affix on the verb, a phenomenon which in recent…

This book is a selected distillation of linguistic scholarship which describes from both a historical (diachronic) and a contemporary (synchronic) viewpoint that conglomerate set of dialects and idiolects called English. The emphasis is on contemporary American English. But foreign language examples are also given in an attempt to demonstrate the…