The Arabic traditional grammar as well as Chomsky's mainstream theory may not be able to provide a good analysis of some fixed Arabic phrases. The challenge of such data directly stems from the fact that the general syntactic rules assumed by the two opposing theories cannot explain the syntactic and the semantic aspects of the fixed Arabic data.…

The present study focuses on long distance scrambling and operator movement from embedded clauses to sentence initial position in Turkish. It proposes that the scrambling of the arguments out of the complement clauses is possible due to the fact that such phrases move cyclically through phases in Turkish. It is also asserted that the adjuncts that…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

This study examines Mood, Modality, and Attitude as a part of Appraisal theory in the Editorial News of the "Sydney Morning Herald" Interpersonal Meta function Analysis. Three methods were used, including (1) Indicative (Declarative and Interrogative) mood, (2) Modalization (Indicative Type), Probability (may be) and Usuality…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun 'self' within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the…

This study attempts to explain a systematic phenomenon that has been described in interlanguage grammars crosslinguistically: Null-Prep, which consists of omitting the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. We propose that Null-Prep is not related to lack of knowledge of "wh"-movement, as previously assumed, but to…

The researcher in this study applied the notions of quantitative method, theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics to examine the correlation between the linguistic theory of end-weight principle and English adjective clauses in Q1-SCOPUS applied linguistics articles and Thai EFL learners' descriptive essays. The significance of this study…

Over the past two decades, the Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) has become a popular buzzword in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Although applications of the ILH can improve students' learning of productive vocabulary, this effect appears to be transitory. Students' learning of productive vocabulary often fades over time, as shown…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

Different linguistic classifications of Spanish and Slovak make the differences between these two languages. The genetic criterion classifies languages, clustering them into language families, the largest among which is the Indoeuropean one. The typological criterion divides languages according to their grammatical structures. Meanwhile, Slovak is…