When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of…

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

Discusses Prince's (1992) reanalysis of the information status of noun phrases (NPs) into two cross-cutting distinctions, one between NPs denoting entities that are new or old with respect to the discourse and another between NPs denoting entities that, in the speaker's estimation, are new or old with respect to the addressee. (Nine references)…

Proposals for foot structure in Japanese have been limited to versification and to mechanisms for assigning tone that bear little resemblance to stress feet. It is argued that a bimoraic foot whose properties are similar to those of stress feet in other languages plays a significant role in Japanese morphophonology. (35 references) (JL)

Examines some of the early uses of instrumental nouns unaccompanied by prepositions and considers the various meanings they conveyed, in order to show the kinds of changes they have undergone. A number of nominal forms have been adverbialized, and some have been replaced by prepositional phrases or other grammatical constructions. (SL)

Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

This paper seeks to determine the essential qualities of proper nouns and to determine the differences between proper and common nouns by reviewing research and writings on the subject. Both proper and common nouns are found to connote the attributes of objects as their content. Common nouns, however, are those that identify a certain substance on…

Discusses the differences between the English native and nonnative speaker's creation and use of nominal compounds. A comparison between English speakers and Japanese native speakers indicates that not only must nonnative speakers acquire rules in order to effectively compound words in English, but that rules must indeed exist, indicating that…

The structure of the noun phrase (NP) in Alsea, an extinct language of the Oregon coast, is examined with particular attention to the behavior of a clitic occurring in second position within the NP. A presentation of the basic facts includes the following: referential(s) and the deictics, possessive pronouns, third-person possessive, the ergative,…

Li's work, which expands the government binding (GB) literature on Chinese linguistics and contributes to understanding constituency and word order, is described. Important issues are noted, empirical or theory-neutral criticisms of Li's accounts are raised, and alternative solutions are offered. (21 references) (LB)

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…