Volume 20, Issue 2

Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxiliaries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist “schema-combination” account, only children who produced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want? ) produced a characteristic “auxiliary-doubling” error (e.g., * What does she doesn't want? ) for the corresponding negative question type. This suggests that these errors are formed by superimposing a positive question frame (e.g., What does THING PROCESS? ) and an inappropriate negative frame (e.g., She doesn't PROCESS ) learned from declarative utterances. In addition, a significant correlation between input frequency and correct production was observed for 11 of the 12 lexical frames (e.g., What does THING PROCESS? ), although some negative question types showed higher rates of error than one might expect based on input frequency alone. Implications for constructivist and generativist theories of question-acquisition are discussed.

Cantonese-, German-, and English-speaking children aged 2;6, 3,6, and 4,6 acted out transitive sentences containing novel verbs in three conditions: (1) agent and patient were cued redundantly by both word order and animacy; (2) agent and patient were marked only with word order; and (3) agent and patient were cued in conflicting ways with word order and animacy. All three age groups in all three languages comprehended the redundantly cued sentences. When word order was the only cue, English children showed the earliest comprehension at 2;6, then German, and then Cantonese children at 3;6. When the cues conflicted, none of the 2;6 children in any language comprehended in adult-like ways, whereas all of the children at 3;6 and 4;6 preferred word order over animacy (but with some cross-linguistic differences in performance as well). When animacy contrast changed across sentence types, Cantonese children comprehended the sentences differently at all three age levels, German children did so at the two younger ages, and English children only at the youngest age. The findings correspond well with the informativeness of word order in the three languages, suggesting that children's learning of the syntactic marking of agent-patient relations is strongly influenced by nature of the language they hear around them.

The article starts from the description of premodification in English nominal phrases as structured in four zones, given in Quirk and colleagues (A Comprehensive Grammar of Contemporary English, Longman, 1985). The argument is that one explanation for the zones and the zone order is in premodifiers' types of meaning (“semantic structure”), following the analysis of meaning types in Cruse (Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, 2004). Semantic structure is distinguished from content; different senses of words can have the same core content but different semantic structures, and accordingly occur in different zones. It is assumed that syntax and other levels of language contribute to the full understanding of premodifier order, complementing this semantic explanation. The introduction outlines the zone structure, and the semantic analysis to be used. Section 2 discusses the zone immediately before the head, arguing that words there have non-descriptive meaning (denoting entities); for example, percussion in “your actual tinny round percussion instrument”. Section 3 argues that words in the next zone have a concrete descriptive meaning; for example, round in the phrase just cited. Section 4 argues that words in the next zone have abstract, scalar descriptive meaning, or emotive meaning; for example, tinny . Section 5 argues that words in the first zone have purely grammatical meaning; for example, actual .

This article focuses on motion metaphors of time and complements Moore's (Cognitive Linguistics 17: 199–244, 2006) analysis, which insightfully discusses time metaphors, from the standpoint of Japanese data. The present paper argues that time metaphors should be analyzed in terms of Langacker's (Observations and speculations on subjectivity, John Benjamins, 1985, Cognitive Linguistics, 1: 5–38, 1990a, Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar, Mouton de Gruyter, 1990b) subjective/objective construal if Japanese data are considered. More specifically, the present analysis classifies time metaphors in terms of the ground's subjective/objective construal and depends on whether they are deictic or not. When the ground is placed offstage, a given expression is non-deictic and can have the order meaning. This article emphasizes that the order meaning is produced by the ground's objective construal and that this cognitive ability is crucial for comparing two events or persons. By focusing on the ground's subjective/objective construal, the difference between Japanese mae and saki can be captured. The present paper will show that the application of the Cognitive Grammar approach to Japanese temporal expressions can supplement existing metaphor theories and that the cognitive linguistic theory of subjectivity is a useful tool with respect to capturing the properties of Japanese temporal expressions.

We test two hypotheses relevant to the form-meaning relationship and offer a methodological contribution to the empirical study of near-synonymy within the framework of cognitive linguistics. In addition, we challenge implicit assumptions about the nature of the paradigm, which we show is skewed in favor of a few forms that are prototypical for a given lexical item. If one accepts the claim of construction grammar that the construction is the relevant unit of linguistic analysis, then we should expect to find a relationship between the meanings of words and the constructions they are found in. One way to investigate this expectation is by examining the meaning of constructions on the basis of their lexical profile; this line of research is pursued in collostructional analyses. We have taken a different approach, examining the meaning of near-synonyms on the basis of what we call their “constructional profile”. We define a constructional profile as the frequency distribution of the constructions that a word appears in. Constructional profiles for Russian nouns denoting sadness and happiness are presented, based upon corpus data, and analyzed quantitatively (using chi square and hierarchical cluster analysis). The findings are compared to the introspective analyses offered in synonym dictionaries.

Parallelism between targets in a comparative structure is not always respected in some comparative standards in Japanese that allow the conceptual expansion of their referents, e.g., Nihon-no jinkoo-wa kankoku-yori ooi (The population of Japan is larger than Korea). We would like to investigate the conditions under which conceptual expansion is permitted. In contrast to Japanese, the standard of comparison in English adheres to the constraint of parallelism, (e.g., The population of Japan is larger than *(that of) Korea.) and other European languages follow suit. There seems to be a typological difference between Japanese and English, and the key to understanding this lies in the positioning of the mandatory morpheme designating the concept of comparison. After discussing conceptual expansion in comparative contexts, I then move on to more general situations, and consider the availability of conceptual expansion with reference to the central/peripheral distinction of participants involved in an event. We shall see that the breaking of the parallelism constraint in Japanese comparative sentences is the result of conceptual expansion meeting general constraints on its occurrence.