Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or…

This paper presents a class of sentences that certain syntactic rules of English would be expected to produce, but that are not grammatical. The sentences all involve the raising of a sentential Noun Phrase (NP) and the subsequent application of some syntactic rule to that senential NP. A constraint, referred to as the Antigone Constraint, is…

This paper discusses the ongoing debate over small clauses concerning the structure of the verb phrase in "I consider Bill smart." It is demonstrated that the subject constituent in question is not a small clause, but a Noun Phrase (NP), following Noun (N). It is shown that some peculiar phenomena under the small clause analysis are…

Argues that the case-filter, essentially a morphological condition which determines the distribution of noun phrases, should be replaced. This new principle would relate morphological dependency of maximal lexical projections to a certain type of semantic dependency. (CB)

Explores the hypothesis that the meaning of a word, especially a noun, relates directly to the types of relationships that the speaker has to the various referents that the word lets him construct, and that the referents have with their environment. Polysemic, metonymic, and metaphoric uses then tend to become confused with the actual lexical…

Summarizes the main features of discourse representation theory, situation-based approaches, and dynamic semantics, and discusses the role the novelty condition plays in each of them, providing the main theoretical coordinates against which to try an assessment of the role of the Chinese conditional and a proposal put forth by Chang and Huang…

In this article I provide evidence that despite frequently cited differences between child first language (L1) and adult second language (L2) speakers in overt behavior (performance) during grammatical development, the nature, source, and limits of implicit knowledge (competence) in native and second language grammars are equivalent (i.e., they…

Pronouns take the place of other nouns. In the case of personal pronouns, they often take the place of nouns that identify persons. The pronoun highlights the difference by being formed differently, and by being placed in different spots in the sentences. Pronouns point out the differences as they change form, and vary their representational…

The two major schools of thought concerned with the meaning of proper names, i.e., the direct-reference or referrential/causal theory, and the description theory, are outlined, and new arguments are presented for a strong version of the second of these theories. The referential theory takes the meaning of the name as being the same as its…

This paper uses a discussion of experiments with aphasics' use of verbally derived nouns to illustrate how one linguistic model may be superior to another in accounting for the facts of verbal behavior. The models involved are the transformational, which relates derived nominals to their source verb and lists only the verb in the lexicon, and the…

Chomsky has suggested that certain lexical items, which he calls "referential items," should be given integer markers (or "indices") and that the noun-phrase deletion transformation which creates reflexive pronouns should be limited to cases where the noun-phrase to be deleted is fully identical to the antecedent noun-phrase,…

The predominant view of the binding facts of the Japanese reflexive "zibun" is that there are two types of uses; one is as a reflexive that is to be bound by the clause-mate subject, and the other is as the so-called "logophoric" pronoun. Accordingly, the binding theory of "zibun" along the lines of this view will…

Proposes that the theory of focus not only accounts for the definiteness restriction with respect to material extraposed from the noun phrase, but also contributes crucially to an explanation for the variable acceptability of sentences containing extractions from extraposed prepositional phrases. (58 references) (JL)

Four lexical features of a noun are relevant to agreement: semantic conditions on reference; person, number, and gender features of the referential index; concord features; and declension class. These features are correlated by a chain of binary constraints. Patterns of mixed agreement result from individual violations to the constraints. Three…