In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…

Request for information (RfI) is believed to be the universally dominant function of young children's questioning, whereas request for action (RfA) has been reported to be the leading interrogative form used in early child Cantonese. The possibility of crosslinguistic variability prompts further research and comparison with additional languages.…

The present study seeks to expand the current focus on acquisition situations in linguistic relativity research by exploring the effects of nativisation (the process by which a L2 is acquired as a L1) on language-specific cognitive behaviour. Categorisation preferences of goal-oriented motion events were investigated in South African speakers who…

This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature--namely, that inversion with "wh"-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

One important mechanism suggested to underlie the acquisition of grammar is rule learning. Indeed, infants aged 0 ; 7 are able to learn rules based on simple identity relations (adjacent repetitions, ABB: "wo fe fe" and non-adjacent repetitions, ABA: "wo fe wo", respectively; Marcus et al., 1999). One unexplored issue is…

Most English adjectives can appear either prenominally or as predicates. (1) a. the red rose b. Roses are red. There are also adjectives that can appear only in one position or the other, but not in both: (2) a. * the awake child b. The child is awake. (3) a. the former president b. * The president is former. The primary goal of this dissertation…

We investigate whether people might come to produce utterances that they regard as ungrammatical by examining the production of ungrammatical verb-construction combinations (e.g., "The dancer donates the soldier the apple") after exposure to both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. We contrast two accounts of how such production might take…

"Reclaiming Ga?" is a curious title for readers oblivious to the fact that the meaning of "?a?" has been lost. Indeed, "?a?" is but one of several linguistic signals of Koine Greek that allude the grasp of the modern scholar. This has created an environment within NT studies described here as conjunctive…

A considerable number of studies on focus-on-form instruction, corrective feedback and uptake have been carried out in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research over the last two decades. These studies have investigated the above-mentioned concepts from different perspectives, in a number of different contexts and in a number of…

The effect of referent salience on second language (L2) article production in real time was explored. Thai (-articles) and French (+articles) learners of English described dynamic events involving two referents, one visually cued to be more salient at the point of utterance formulation. Definiteness marking was made communicatively redundant with…

Or is commonly understood to be a conjunction linking two or more constituents. Ending a sentence with "or" is considered non-canonical in written interaction, but ending a turn with "or" occurs regularly in spoken interaction. This dissertation investigates the interactional work of turn-final or as in "Did his oxygen get…

This dissertation establishes the syntactic representation and derivation of relative clause (RC) constructions in Bizkaiera Basque. Using native speaker introspection, grammaticality judgment under direct elicitation and formal experiments, I show that Bizkaiera follows the Head raising strategy in RC construction. Evidence for this comes from…

Comparative correlatives, like "the longer you stay out in the rain, the colder you'll get," are prolific in the world's languages (i.e., there is no evidence of a language that lacks comparative correlatives). Despite this observation, the data do not present a readily apparent syntax. What is the relationship between the two clauses?…