A phrase-structural analysis of preverbal word orders in three Mayan languages (Tzotzil, Jakaltek, Tz'utujil) is presented. At the heart of the analysis is an account of intonational phrasing and the distribution of several intonational phrase clitics in Tzotzil and Jakaltek. (70 references) (Author/LB)

In communicating, conversationalists constantly make decisions about their interlocutors' state of knowledge and on the basis of these decisions make lexical, grammatical, and intonational choices about how to manage the "flow" of information. This paper focuses on how such decision making affects choices in relative clause constructions…

Evidence from Irish is presented to show that a language may be marked so that Spec position is located on one side of the head, and all nonspecifiers, at both levels of phrase structure, occur on the other. It is concluded that Irish requires adjuncts to conform to head-initiality. (Contains 50 references.) (LB)

Analyzes the case marking structure of Japanese. It is proposed that the Case particle has its projection, the Kase Phrase, and that its head, Kase, receives case and a thematic role from an external source, and assigns them to the noun phrase.(36 references) (JL)

Outlines the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, tests are developed for distinguishing these two clause types. A range of exclamative structures is then presented. (Author/VWL)

In this study, seven children with specific language impairment (SLI) and speech deficits were matched with same age peers and evaluated for iambic (weak-strong) and trochaic (strong-weak) prosodic speech forms. Findings indicated that children with SLI and speech deficits show less mature segmental and speech motor systems, as well as decreased…

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…

A think-aloud method was used to examine the content of information available to working memory during narrative comprehension in a CHI population. Twenty severe CHI participants (>1 year post-injury) and 20 controls talked aloud after they read each sentence of story narratives. Trabasso and Magliano's (1996a) verbal protocol analysis was then…

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of…

The present experiments investigate the influence of modifier relation frequency and discourse context on the interpretation of novel noun-noun phrases (as measured by both the ease of interpretation and the types of interpretations that are provided). We assess whether people access knowledge about the relations with which the modifier is…

Two experiments examined the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms were noticed but the critical aspects of meaning were not. Miniature noun class systems were employed, and the participants were told that the choice of determiner in noun phrases depended on whether the object was "near" or "far" from the…

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost…

After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are…

One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…

Using a corpus-based approach, this paper investigates the construction of stance in finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complementation. The data are drawn from two corpora of theses in contrasting disciplines: a social science--politics--and a natural science--materials science. A network for the analysis of reporting clauses is…