The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Prepositions can be found with and without adjacent complements in many forms of popular spoken French. The alternation appears in main clauses ("il veut pas payer pour ca [approximately] il veut pas payer pour" "he doesn't want to pay for [it]") and, though with a more restricted social and geographic distribution, in relative…

The authors of "Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence", Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses…

Explores use of phrase 'taken for granted' including 'accept as true' and 'to fail to give subject's due.' Suggests latter usage has been noticed by few dictionary compilers, and EFL learners find it difficult to use and understand. (Author/BK)

Explores the paradoxes and vagaries of the English language. Looks at a number of English words and phrases that turn out to mean the opposite of or something very different from what people think they mean. (MG)

Proposes that the theory of focus not only accounts for the definiteness restriction with respect to material extraposed from the noun phrase, but also contributes crucially to an explanation for the variable acceptability of sentences containing extractions from extraposed prepositional phrases. (58 references) (JL)

Investigated children's acquisition of short- and long-distance "whose"-questions to see whether children know that, in English, the entire "whose"-phrase must pied-pipe to the specifier of complementizer. Subjects were English-speaking children, ages 4-6. phrase. (Author/VWL)

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

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…