Volume 46, Issue 3

In this article, we propose a contrastive, panchronic method of semantic-pragmatic analysis, which we find particularly useful for uncovering the subtle distinctions of meaning and use that are characteristic of particle(-like expression)s in many languages. By way of illustration, we offer an in-depth analysis of the synchronic uses and diachronic development of two cognate particles from two Romance languages, namely French déjà and Italian già , equivalent in some of their most salient uses to English already. Synchronically, we have identified fifteen different uses of déjà and già , of which eight are shared between the two particles. We argue that both the gradual diachronic expansion of the range of uses of both items, and the small, but nevertheless clear, differences of use among the two that we observe in synchrony, support an analysis in terms of polysemy, as opposed to monosemy. What we propose is in the first instance a synchronic description of the two particles. The diachronic facts adduced are principally used to support our contention that déjà and già are polysemous, and as an additional tool for identifying which uses should be regarded as separate senses.

This study addresses the extent to which the location of primary stress in Dutch, German, and English monomorphemic words is affected by the syllables preceding the three final syllables. We present analyses of the monomorphemic words in the CELEX lexical database, which showed that penultimate primary stress is less frequent in Dutch and English trisyllabic than quadrisyllabic words. In addition, we discuss paper-and-pencil experiments in which native speakers assigned primary stress to pseudowords. These experiments provided evidence that in all three languages penultimate stress is more likely in quadrisyllabic than in trisyllabic words. We explain this length effect with the preferences in these languages for word-initial stress and for alternating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The experimental data also showed important intra- and interspeaker variation, and they thus form a challenging test case for theories of language variation.

The Minimalist Program introduced a new concept of language and added new content to the innateness position concerning our linguistic capacity. It also redefined the metatheoretical role of the theory of acquisition within generative grammar. This article explores at length all these issues and offers a critical survey of the disconcerting situation dominating today's relationship between syntacticians and acquisitionists.

This article deals with the representation of complement sentences in a speaker's mental grammar, and the contribution of complement-taking predicates and complement clause types to the overall meaning of the complement sentence. Either complement-taking predicates alone, or both complement-taking predicates and complement clause types have been argued to have meanings that contribute to the overall meaning of the complement sentence. The article examines the distribution of various complement clause types in Ancient Greek, and argues that this distribution is best accounted for in a constructionist model. In this model, individual combinations of complement-taking predicates and complement clause types are constructions, that is, grammatical entities independent of the words in the sentence, with both formal structure and semantic and pragmatic content. The latter is associated with the combination “complement-taking predicate + complement clause type” as a whole, rather than being part of the mental representation of either the complement-taking predicate or the complement-clause type as such. Form-meaning relations in complement constructions are also discussed.

In this article we examine the enclitic - mm in Amharic and its claimed functions as topic marker and coordinative conjunction. The enclitic -mm has multiple translations into English, and would thus seem to constitute a multifunctional morpheme. In contrast to previous analyses, we argue that the several interpretations of enclitic - mm in discourse are due to different context-dependent readings of its single function, namely as contrastive focus marker.

Eighty Polish children and adolescents aged from 6 to 18 participated in a nonce word inflection experiment testing their productivity with the two genitive masculine endings, -a and -u, and their sensitivity to the distributional and semantic factors determining the choice of ending. All participants were able to use at least one ending productively, although the youngest children did not do so consistently, confirming earlier research which suggests that children are only partially productive with these inflections. In the youngest group, the choice of ending was not influenced by either semantic or distributional cues. Participants began to show sensitivity to distributional cues from about ten years of age; the strength of this sensitivity continued to increase right up to age 18. However, only a few of the oldest participants were also sensitive to the semantic factors determining the choice of ending. Another unexpected finding was a sharp increase in the number of gender errors around age 14, suggesting that the system might be undergoing a reorganization at this late age. The experiment also revealed considerable individual differences in the rate of development as well as the actual generalizations that learners extract. The results challenge the widely-held view that learners' mental grammars reach a steady state in early or middle childhood, and that speakers of the same dialect acquire the same set of rules.