Three experiments examined preschoolers' and adults' understanding of distinctive semantic functions of adjectives and count nouns. Found that 4-year olds and adults, but not 3-year olds, who heard the adjective version (e.g., "a blue bird") were more likely than those who heard the count noun version ("a bluebird") to choose…

Attempts to show that exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation evoked that the anaphor is interpreted; and exphora is a more central manifestation of anaphora than the "endophoric" type. Naturally occurring data from English and French are the…

Addresses the position of adjectives in the noun phrase in Modern Greek, concentrating on the possible interpretations that the adjective can have relative to the noun. Differences observed between definite and indefinite noun phrases are suggested to be consequences of their predicative nature and the way this interacts with the…

Demonstrates the similarities between English and Farsi with respect to discourse-functional constraints on inversion. It is argued that this phenomenon is significant because these two languages exhibit different canonical word order and thus expectations can be raised from some functional-syntactic universals. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Analyzes the use of verb-noun collocations by advanced German speaking students of English in free written production. Types of mistakes that learners make when producing collocations are identified. The influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of learners' first language on the production of collocations is investigated. (VWL)

Examines form-similar nouns in early lexical development of a bilingual German/English child, as well as effects of form similarity in picture naming and translation in two groups of German/English children. Results show an effect of form similarity in early lexical development; form similar words occurred frequently in the beginning of the…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Discusses the interpretation of nominal compounds in the context of natural language processing for information retrieval. Knowledge-intensive algorithms that can successfully interpret compounds found in technical documents are described, and experiments are reported that indicate these algorithms may be unnecessary for improving retrieval…

Examines evidence relevant to the determination of the configurational/nonconfigurational character of clause structure in Modern Greek. The analysis is developed within a framework that accounts for nominative assignment in the context of predication theory. An explanation for the fact that SVO is a routine alternative in Greek is provided. (46…

Three studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs). In contrast to earlier findings, results provided evidence for cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. Results suggest that late closure is not language-specific but specific to only certain classes of…

Presents a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children aged 1;3 to 5;2 were analyzed. Results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which…

This study shows that the noun bias in early vocabularies rests only in part on the acquisition of object names. An analysis of vocabulary composition from 45 children at I;8 indicates that more nouns are acquired than all other word classes but that only about half of the nouns acquired are the names of basic level object classes (BLOCs). (KM)

Reports on the results of a descriptive study of the noun phrase agreement behavior exhibited by three first-year Spanish language students during a series of oral interviews conducted over six months (two academic quarters).(13 references) (JL)

Reports on initial steps in performing linguistic analyses on textual material found in a bibliographic database and suggests that useful data can be provided for information retrieval systems by using research methods from linguistic inquiry. Searches of noun phrases in the ERIC database are described, and further research is suggested. (10…

Discusses ergative case marking system in Anatolian branch of Indo-European in which neuters inflect ergatively and common-gender nouns inflect accusatively. Development from instrumental to ergative that occurred in prehistory of Gorokan languages of Papua New Guinea is also discussed. It is suggested that this process is a general mechanism for…