Volume 47, Issue 5

Children's early production typically favors prototypical groupings of temporal-aspectual features; children prefer to say telic, perfective, past combinations (e.g., broke) and atelic, imperfective present combinations (e.g., riding). The current experiments examine the extent to which adults also favor these prototypical groups in a comprehension task (Experiment 1) and a sentence comparison task (Experiment 2). The results show that, like children, adults find prototypical combinations easier to understand, particularly in low-information contexts. Moreover, adults judge prototypical combinations as better sentences than nonprototypical sentences. The results are argued to support continuity in aspectual representations. The differences between children and adults is linked to the proposed origin of the prototypes themselves, namely, information processing demands.

Two connectionist networks, DISLEX and DevLex-II, were used in this study to model the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Both models use multi-layered self-organizing feature maps, connected by associative links trained according to the Hebbian learning rule. Previous empirical research has identified a strong association between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in child language, on the basis of which some researchers argue for innate semantic categories or prelinguistic predispositions. Our simulations indicate that such an association can emerge from dynamic self-organization and Hebbian learning in connectionist networks, without the need of a priori assumptions about the structure of innate knowledge. Our modeling results further attest to the utility of self-organizing neural networks in the study of language acquisition.

The article addresses the problem of the linguistic encoding of the locative roles of Goal and Source of motion. After discussing the typological patterns of marking static locations, goals, and sources of motion, I analyze data from Wan, a Southeastern Mande language that often does not encode the distinction between sources and goals either outside of the verb (by adpositions or case) or in the verb's argument structure. In addition to a class of specialized verbs that subcategorize for a particular type of locative argument (“source verbs” and “goal verbs”), Wan has a number of verbs that do not restrict their argument to either sources or goals. I show that the two verb classes contrast with respect to the amount of information about the direction of motion that is entailed by the verb's lexical meaning. In encoding the role of the locative argument, the two verb classes rely on different strategies: the semantic role is either encoded in the verb's argument structure, or inferred from the interaction of contextual information and the verb's lexical entailments. I demonstrate how the lexical entailments of motion verbs influence their subcategorization pattern and discuss crosslinguistic evidence that supports this analysis.

This article is concerned with the problem of argument-function mismatch observed in the (apparent) subject-object inversion in Chinese consumption verbs, e.g., chi ‘eat’ and he ‘drink’, and accommodation verbs, e.g., zhu ‘live’ and shui ‘sleep’. These verbs seem to allow the linking of 〈agent-SUBJ theme-OBJ〉 as well as 〈agent-OBJ theme-SUBJ〉, but only when the agent is also the semantic role denoting the measure or extent of the action. The account offered is formulated within LFG's lexical mapping theory. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of the argument-function mapping principle (or the θ -criterion), a composite role such as ag-ext receives syntactic assignment via one composing role only; the second composing role must be suppressed. Apparent subject-object inversion occurs when in the competition between the two composing roles, agext, the agent loses out and is suppressed. This account also facilitates a natural explanation of markedness among the competing syntactic structures.

This article analyzes two elements in Mandarin Chinese that denote repetition, you ‘again’ and zai ‘again’. It has been assumed that you occurs in realis contexts, whereas zai occurs in irrealis contexts. We find that in fact each may occur in either context; furthermore, we argue that these two elements should be distinguished in terms of the structural positions they adjoin to and the event structures they occur in. We adopt Shen's (Journal of East Asian Linguistics 13: 309–336, 2004) framework of phrase structure and event structure for Mandarin Chinese sentences, and show that you adjoins to a dynamic AspP, and zai to a static vP. Our analysis accounts for a number of properties of you and zai , including their relative structural heights and their ability to induce change of the event structure of the predicate.