Describes the use of some determiners in French and shows how their syntactic and semantic roles are interrelated. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The present research examined how 3- and 5-year-old Japanese children map novel nouns and verbs onto dynamic action events and generalize them to new instances. Studies 1 to 3 demonstrated that although both 3- and 5-year-olds were able to map novel nouns onto novel objects, only 5-year-olds could generalize verbs solely on the basis of the…

Properties of the input, such as raw frequency and syntactic diversity, have been shown to play a role, to different extents, in the acquisition of nouns and verbs. This study investigated the relationship between three properties of the input (input frequency, syntactic diversity, and variety in noun-type co-occurrence) and age of acquisition of…

Two experiments examined the role of perceptual complexity, object familiarity and form class cues on how children interpret novel adjectives and count nouns. Four-year-old children participated in a forced-choice match-to-target task in which an exemplar was named with a novel word and children were asked to choose another one that matched the…

The discussion of Nweh, a Bantu language, focuses on a group of adjectives that can occur in positions where one would expect a noun, and which appear to enter noun classification. Specifically, the reasons that these adjectives have noun properties and that the pronominal class marker for the adjective is invariant are investigated. First, the…

Deals with problems encountered by English learners of French in learning to use nouns, articles and the present tense, and in using them together. A way to revise the presentation of the French noun-article system and to make the identification of nouns and articles easier is presented. (CLK)

Some of the new statistical research of Wladimir D. Admoni and the language typology work of Winfred P. Lehmann is presented. It is then shown that the results of the two methods can be put together to bring forth new knowledge about the present-day tendencies of German syntax. (Text is in German.) (TL)

Deals with clause chaining in Washkuk, a language spoken by about 2500 people in northeastern New Guinea. Four clause types are ranked from lowest to highest. Any clause subordinates all preceding clauses of lower order. (TL)

In this paper the bitransitive clause is defined in terms of its nuclear tagmemes: subject, predicate, direct object, and indirect object. A semantic characterization is given of the prototype bitransitive clause with a correlation of situational roles and grammatical functions. The nine different dominant orders in bitransitive clauses which were…

An investigation of Russian surnames reveals a system in which pronunciation is largely determined by two sets of factors. The author considers in detail the relationship between the stress in a surname and the stress in a word from which the name is derived and also the relationship between the stress in surnames and their "endings" as they are…

Traces the historical changes of the verb "like" and shows how the verb's role in Modern English has a greater influence in syntax as opposed to semantics. This change in the verb's function has led to the formation of a new lexical subcategorization frame, or redefinition of the verb. (TR)

This article discusses the construction substantive + the preposition DE+ substantive in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Examines the occurrence of filled pauses (FP) in the spontaneous speech of 11 speakers, finding that FP's occur (1) less often than expected before nouns, verbs, and adverbs, (2) more often than expected before pronouns, and (3) about as often as expected before adjectives. Tables and references. (VJ)