A study investigated children's hypotheses about the meanings of novel verbs on the child's first exposure to the verb. The study focused on the properties (action, result, or instrument) ascribed to the verbs before any information was given about word meaning. Subjects were 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults. The stimuli were six sets of…

A study of the Samoan "-cia" suffix is presented. It argues that, contrary to prevailing theory, Samoan does have an active/passive contrast but that it is indicated by a difference in word order rather than by verbal morphology. It is shown, however, that "-cia" is similar to a passive suffix in that passive involves the…

This study assessed the role of frequency of input in the acquisition of the present perfect by Scottish and American children. Two questions were addressed: Do adults speaking Scottish English use the present perfect more frequently in speech to children than those speaking American English? If there is a difference in the frequency of input, how…

Explains three elements of English that are particularly difficult for Chinese students to learn: the use of articles, which has no equivalent in Chinese; expression of tense, for which there is no Chinese equivalent; and the concepts of time, locality, and direction inherent in English usage of prepositions. (MSE)

Reviews aspects of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, emphasizing language functions, modality vs modulation, process types, transitivity, information distribution, and cohesion. Implications for language teaching are discussed. (AM)

This paper sketches an explicitly non-lexicalist application of grammatical theory to Huallaga (Huanuco) Quechua (HgQ). The advantages of applying binding theory to many suffixes that have previously been treated only as objects of the morphology are demonstrated. After an introduction, section 2 outlines basic assumptions about the nature of HgQ…

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…

The Japanese sentence-final particle "no" is analyzed as a marker of evidentiality, signaling that the speaker shares a commitment to the knowledge in question with a group of which he is part. In contrast, bare verb forms (BVs) (i.e., the absence of "no") indicate that the speaker, as an individual, is committed to the…

The criteria employed in most textbooks to differentiate "ser" and "estar" followed by an adjective are mainly semantic. Most exercises offer to second language learners too high a proportion of "estar" usages, a practice that leads to overgeneralization with regard to the use of "estar." An experiment was…

In a study extending and refining Carol Chomsky's research, 48 Arabic speaking children aged six, eight, and ten were tested for their comprehension of imperatives using the complement-requiring verbs Ask, Tell, and Promise. Clear support for children's overgeneralization of the minimal distance principle was found only with Promise constructions.…

Linguistics can be used explicitly in the teaching of foreign languages to mature students. Eight guidelines derived from this statement guide the discussion of the application of linguistics to the teaching of Latin verb paradigms to beginning students. The five tense/mood paradigms that are based on the present stem, that is, the present,…

This paper describes an improvisational dance model that analyzes verbs and adverbs in terms of their movement essence and yields a unique group dance using dancers of any age or experience. Essence dance uses word cards to build a dance. Each word (verb or adverb) suggests a movement or use of the body. The teacher begins by charting a piece of…

Chinese students have particular problems with the intersection of two English verb classes: transitional event verbs and state verbs of having and being. The problem is that these two verb classes appear to "pair up." Chinese students tend to be unaware that these two classes pair up. This study investigated whether lexical aspect could…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…