This study aims at investigating how borrowed nouns from English are inflected for plural and gender in Colloquial Saudi Arabic (CSA). The attempt is also made to account for the possible linguistic factors which may affect this inflection in light of some theories in morphology. The analysis is based on more than 250 loanwords collected from…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

The present article examines the effect of variable input on the acquisition of plural morphology in two varieties of Spanish: Chilean Spanish, where the plural marker is sometimes omitted due to a phonological process of syllable final /s/ lenition, and Mexican Spanish (of Mexico City), with no such lenition process. The goal of the study is to…

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so…

Recipes exhibit a phenomenon nonexistent in other commonly studied varieties, (for example, conversational discourse), namely, zero anaphors as direct objects. This article examines this phenomenon and explores its consequences for linguistic theory. Results reveal that stylistic, semantic, and discourse factors are the most important in the…

Analyzes two variants of subject doubling in Ontario French: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. It is proposed that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP (noun phrase), while lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant.(Author/JL)

An examination of some surface differences between quantifier phrases (QP) in standard Italian, Genoese dialect, and French is reported. The analysis makes specific reference to the distribution of empty noun phrase and adjectival phrase categories in SpecN, and uses the concept of inflectional rules. Although details have not yet been worked out,…

Critiques Carstair's Paradigm Economy Principle (PEP) with regard to historical linguistics. The principle "one form, one meaning" (OFOM) is contrasted with PEP as providing a more satisfactory explanation for occurrences of morphological change. Latin and Maori paradigms are used as examples. (Author/LMO)

In this paper, non-standard types of agreement are examined. Such agreement types are those in which two or more supposedly agreeing categories show discord rather than concord. For example, if a language has noun-adjective agreement, there may, under limited circumstances, be non-standard agreement where the subject is plural and the agreeing…

A study of English nouns derived from verbs and ending in "-ee" is outlined. The objective was to determine whether those nouns exhibit verbal characteristics (aspectual, temporal, or modal) that can be attributed to their derivation from verbs. The study examined 209 nouns. Progress made in the investigation of four hypotheses is…

Interview tapes of adult Cubans from the Latin American Capital Cities Dialect Project were transcribed, focusing on the variability in the deletion of word-final consonants, especially /s/. The operation of the deletion rule for /s/ in Cuban Spanish is shown to be principally dependent on grammatical categories and surface syntactic function. In…

Clark's 1987 Principle of Contrast seems inconsistent with the synonymy exhibited by inflectional affixes in languages with inflection classes. But if inflection class membership identifies the inflection class of the lexemes to which it attaches, then inflection affixation complies with this principle. Grammatical implications are suggested. (76…

A collection of research in Japanese and Korean linguistics includes: "Repetition, Reformulation, and Definitions: Prosodic Indexes of Elaboration in Japanese" (Mieko Banno); "Projection of Talk Using Language, Intonation, Deictic and Iconic Gestures and Other Body Movements" (Keiko Emmett); "Turn-taking in Japanese…