Describes how, through the use of two diagrams, one can teach the English present-perfect to Iranian students. One diagram consists of a time-line divided into "past" and "non-past." The other uses an oval to indicate a time-span including the present. Both facilitate comprehension of present-perfect meaning. (PJM)

Focuses on the consequences that the structural configuration of lexical knowledge has for the timecourse of parsing. Discusses reduced relative clauses and proposes a new lexical-structural analysis for manner of motion verbs. The article examines consequences for frequency-based models and all models whose difficulty derives from the ambiguity…

Much earlier controversy surrounding the Chinese "ba" construction stems from dissention over whether or not "ba" has any independent semantic content. "Ba" was assumed either to be a purely formal particle whose function was to assign case, or to have semantic content translating into thematic content. However, under the hypothesis that abstract…

This analysis shows how the Government and Binding (GB) framework of Chomsky may be extended to the focus antipassive construction in K'iche', a Mayan language spoken in the central highland region of Guatemala. The GB model previously has been successfully extended to a number of Romance languages and has shown that a wide range of differences…

Approximately 90 citations are included in this annotated bibliography on the Kiowa-Tanoan languages: Kiowa (Oklahoma) and Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa (New Mexico and Arizona). Both published and unpublished works are included. Among the sources are the following publications: American Anthropologist; Anthropological Linguistics; Bulletin of the Bureau…

The structure of complementation in complex predicates in Korean has attracted configurational analysis. Using a lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework, this paper examines the structure of complementation in complex predicates. The term "predicate" in this context is used to describe both verbs and adjectives that are assumed to…

A number of Seri verbs display a sensitivity to whether a goal, which is a term used for recipients, adressees, etc., is singular or plural. The data presented in this paper are of typological interest. It is argued that Seri has indirect objects, but that there is no one-to-one mapping between the semantic role goal and either the syntactic…

The distribution of Hualapai auxiliary verbs "-yu" and "-wi" can not be explained only by the presence or absence of an object, or by the active or stative feature of the matrix verb. It can be explained in terms of transitivity, in that "-wi" corresponds to high transitivity and "-yu" to low transitivity of…

A syntactic and semantic analysis of the morpheme "kom" in the Hmong language and its place in sentence embedding is presented. Sample sentences of other researchers were compared with information found in folk tales and the resultant hypotheses were tested on native informants. The morpheme has been previously described as meaning the…

The verb stem "maka" ("give") in Nahuatl is unusual in its range of options with respect to transitivity. Like all transitive verb stems, it regularly occurs with an object and must do so, but it also appears in an unusually large number of constructions in which it has two objects. These constructions are examined within the…

This article discusses structural factors responsible for a number of subtle differences in the outcome of language contact in Brussels (Belgium) and Strasbourg (France), and suggest that sociolinguistic factors have little explanatory power in this area. Differences between the rules for past participle formation in Dutch as spoken in Brussels…

Points out that "pro"-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of "pro" not found with the overt pronomials of non-"pro"-drop languages. Notes that while the overt pronouns of non-"pro"-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, "pro" may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. (24 references) (Author/CK)

Examines the distribution of clause types in ancient Greek during the Homeric (pre-800 B.C.) and Hellenistic (ca. 100 A.D.) periods, as well as an intermediate period (ca. 450 B.C.), delineating the evolution from a subject-object-verb (SOV) to a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. (49 references) (MDM)

Drawing on insights developed in information-based syntactic theories, this paper proposes an alternative processual theory, "articulated methodology," which requires that inflectional operations apply to informationally impoverished representations and increase information. An analysis of Potawatomi verb morphology is given. (20…

When it comes to explaining English verbs' patterns of regular and irregular generalization, single-network theories have difficulty with the former, rule-only theories with the latter process. Linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence, based on observation during experiments and simulations in morphological pattern generation, independently call…