Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

Study supported by grants from Brown University, American Philosophical Society, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council. (DS)

Parts 1-3 appeared in "Russisch," v7 n2-4 1973. (DD)

Personal/impersonal negative sentence pairs in Russian are discussed. It is concluded that the structural differences in personal and impersonal negative sentences correspond to a difference in meaning: the absence of the object in general versus the absence of a given, specified object. (Author/RM)

Paper to be presented to the Seventh International Congress of Slavists, Warsaw, Poland, in August 1973. (DS)

Paper to be presented at the Seventh International Congress of Slavists in Warsaw, Poland, August 1973. (DS)

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 A number of nominal forms have been adverbialized, and some have been replaced by prepositional phrases or other grammatical constructions.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)

First part of an article comparing Polish, Czech, German, and Russian pronoun and noun declinations. (DS)

Inexact uses of adverbs by students of Russian which are believed to be caused in part by native language interference are discussed. (RM)