Volume 47, Issue 1

This article provides evidence that, just as lexical meaning is retained in grammaticization, grammatical conditioning persists in fixed discourse formulas. Despite their high frequency and formulaic status, such formulas are not completely autonomous from the productive constructions from which they emerge. This evidence comes from a variationist analysis of that and zero complementizer in a corpus of spoken Canadian English. Testing syntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic factors proposed to account for the variation, we focus on claims that frequent collocations have developed as discourse formulas. Multivariate analysis shows that, although the variation is largely lexically constrained, that serves to demarcate the boundaries of two clauses with lexical content, while zero tends to occur when the clauses function like a single unit. Moreover, the linguistic conditioning of that in frequent collocations that behave like discourse formulas parallels its conditioning in the general construction. These findings suggest that the principle of semantic retention or persistence should be extended to grammar.

The study analyzes command of noun plurals and phonological awareness of Hebrew-speaking children at the beginning and end of the first year of formal schooling. Our aims were to trace the development of noun plurals during a crucial year in children's life, when they are exposed to a considerable amount of spoken and written language; to determine the impact of different morphophonological plural categories on pace of acquisition; and to determine the relationship between morphological awareness (as measured in the Plural Task) and phonological awareness. Research population consisted of 110 Hebrew-speaking first graders aged 6–7, who were tested twice on pluralization and phonological awareness at the beginning and the end of the school year. Results show that learning of noun plurals is still under way in first grade, side by side with clear improvement in phonological skills. Plural acquisition is paced by morphophonological category: Nouns with nonchanging stems and regular suffixes are already at ceiling at age 6 and are not correlated with phonological skills; but nouns with nonchanging stems and irregular suffixes and both categories of changing stems improve significantly, and are correlated with phonology. These results are discussed in terms of different models of morphological processing and acquisition.

This article extends the empirical base of the discussion of oblique subjects in English and French child grammars by examining such subjects in English and French-based contact languages (i.e., pidgins and creoles), particularly in the early stages of their development. It thus provides us with an opportunity to reassess the hypotheses put forward on how and why subjects of main clauses have the oblique form, clearly an intriguing departure. The occurrence of oblique subjects in contact languages is particularly interesting because it shows adults, like children in L1 acquisition, rejecting the correct nominative form in favor of a deviant form. This paper argues that the choice of oblique subjects is determined by the nature of the emerging system. More specifically, it argues that emerging grammars are discourse-bound and subjects, as suggested in Gruber (1967), are in topic position. However, it also extends Gruber's analysis by arguing that the distribution of subjects is driven by their features (namely, [+definite], [+referential] and [+specific]), features that can only be checked in Topic position. The paper thus offers an explanation not only for why subjects surface in the oblique form but also why they tend not to be indefinite or expletive.

When children first mark distinctions in language, they may use semantically possible but nonconventional expressions. This can be seen in their initial attempts to express ‘more-than-one’ in English (conventionally conveyed by use of the plural inflection). We explore children's earliest expressions for ‘more-than-one’ by (a) examining longitudinal records for references to one vs. several objects, (b) eliciting references to pictures depicting one vs. two, three, or four objects, and (c) eliciting answers to what- vs. how many-questions about two or more objects. Longitudinal observations show that (1) the plural ending (-s) emerges piecemeal; and (2) children use numeral + bare-stem nouns (two blanket) before conventional -s. We then elicited singular and plural expressions using pictures from 25 two- and three-year-olds. Most children used plural -s for only a few items; a number relied on numeral + bare-stem forms (two duck); a few used quantifiers like more, and a few iteration with pointing gestures (e.g., for three cats, cat + POINT for each in turn). Knowledge of plural marking was distinct from knowledge of counting: Two-year-olds answered what questions with conventional or non-conventional plurals for up to nine objects, but managed how many-questions only for two or three, did poorly with four or five, and typically failed to respond for six or more, consistent with findings on the conceptual development of number.

Combinations of performative deontic, epistemic and evidential expressions in a clause appear to be very rare in language. This article presents facts to this effect on the basis of Dutch corpus data, and attempts to explain them. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the cognitive status of the semantic notions involved, and more generally of the phenomenon called “tense-aspect-modality marking” or the “qualification of states of affairs” in language. In particular, the aim is to contribute to current theorizing on the hierarchical nature of qualifications and the position of this hierarchical system in a cognitive language model.

Four studies of Spanish morphology are examined that seem to support the dual-route model because they demonstrate an asymmetry between regular and irregular verbal inflection. Yaden's subjects (2003) produced inflected forms of infinitives in which many errors that regularized irregular inflections were produced, but few that irregularized regulars. Clahsen et al. (2002) also found more regularization than irregularization errors in children's speech. However, single-route analogical computer simulations of Yaden's test items and of errors in simulated acquisition yielded the same dissociation between common regularization uncommon irregularization. The experiment by Brovetto and Ullman (2005) entailed inflecting nonce verbs. They argue that two factors influence inflection: the phonological similarity of the nonce stem to extant stems and the verb's conjugational class. They found that phonological similarity only influenced irregularization of words with rimes commonly found in irregular verbs, but not words with rimes common in regular verbs. However, stem similarity and conjugational class are both represented phonologically in the nonce words making them available to influence the nonce words analogically. A single-route simulation of Brovetto and Ullman's test items produced similar outcomes. Because a single-route model can produce the same dissociation between regular and irregular inflections, the data from the cited experiments do not demonstrate the superiority of the dual-route model. In Rodriguez-Fornells et al. (2002), ERPs were measured during a priming study. Regular targets demonstrated an increased positivity between 250 and 450 ms after the presentation of the stimulus, but irregulars did not. However, these findings are suspect because it is not possible to control for the effects of previous knowledge of the word, orthographic overlap, and semantic similarity at the same time. In addition, alternative explanations of the such differences exist which do not require positing different mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection.