Some of recently proposed phonotactic learners are tier-based bigram learners that restrict their hypothesis space to patterns between two segments that are adjacent at the tier level. This assumption is understandable considering that typologically frequent nonadjacent sound patterns are predominantly those that hold between two tier-adjacent…

The issue of data and evidence plays a crucial role in science. What counts as evidence within a theoretical framework is one of the central problems in contemporary linguistics. Although recent publications have focused on this methodological question and highlighted the relevance of different types of data, a fundamental aspect has been ignored:…

The -"s" genitives of English and Swedish play an important role in grammaticalization theory, as they are often used as counterexamples to the main tenet of that theory, viz. that grammatical change is unidirectional. In this paper I look at the emergence of the -"s" genitive in Danish, hoping that it may shed some new light on the evolution of…

The Functional Discourse Grammar model has a twofold objective: on the one hand, to provide a descriptively, psychologically and pragmatically adequate account of the forms made available by a typologically diverse range of languages; and on the other, to provide a model of language which is set up to reflect, at one remove, certain of the stages…

Studying language evolution has become resurgent in modern scientific research. In this revival field, approaches from a number of disciplines other than linguistics, including (paleo)anthropology and archaeology, animal behaviors, genetics, neuroscience, computer simulation, and psychological experimentation, have been adopted, and a wide scope…

In this paper a case of synchronic layering is examined in which Dutch "massa" ("mass") and plural "massa's" ("masses") are attested with lexical uses as a collective noun, quantifying uses ("a large quantity of") and intensifying uses ("very")--with plural "massa's" only--in some Flemish varieties of Dutch. Against the background of…

Cognitive metaphor research is characterized by the diversity of rival theories. Starting from this observation, the paper focuses on the problem of how the unity and diversity of cognitive theories of metaphor can be accounted for. The first part of the paper outlines a suitable metascientific approach which emerges as a modification of B. von…

This article explores the relationship between intuition, introspection and the observation of naturally occurring utterances in linguistic inquiry. Its focus is on the problems that this relationship poses in cognitive approaches to semantics and case theory within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Given the increasing commitment of linguistics…

This epilogue addresses the most important topics and challenges for the Morphosyntactic Level in Functional Discourse Grammar that have been raised in the articles in this Special Issue. We begin by exploring the differences between the Morphosyntactic Level in FDG and the treatment of morphosyntactic phenomena in other linguistic frameworks. We…

Body parts have played an important role in the development of theories describing grammaticalization processes (Heine and Kuteva, 2002, pp. 62-63 and 165-171). Within Uralic linguistics, this particular area of study has not yet received a great deal of attention, although the agglutinative character of most of these languages is known to have…

The general goal of the present paper is to demonstrate how cross-linguistic (contrastive) data can broaden the perspective in cognitive linguistic research on metonymy, which may raise a host of questions calling for a revision of some widely accepted views. A more specific, methodological goal is to show how the introspection-driven research and…

This paper examines Roy Harris' discussion of number and the language of science in his book "History, Science and the Limits of Language" in light of recent work in cognitive linguistics. While many of his points are valid, linguistic theory has since addressed some of these concerns by formulating usage-based, cognitive frameworks to explore and…

Investigators of first language attrition, early bilingualism and child second language learning have found common ground on a number of important points. The present review of the research will show that the study of unevenness in the early development of two languages reveals more clearly how the critical problems for future research on…

Despite the growing body of integrationist literature on the study of language and on a wide range of language-related fields of inquiry, there is as yet no integrationist investigation of the field of language acquisition. This paper argues for the need of an integrationist study of what children learn about language and of how they learn it.…

This rejoinder demonstrates that Lopez-Serena's [Lopez-Serena, A., 2009. "Intuition, acceptability and grammaticality: a reply to Riemer." "Language Sciences" 31, 634-648] critique of Riemer [Riemer, N., 2009. "Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics." "Language Sciences" 31, 612-633] is unfounded. LS's critique is…