Constructions and language change

Idiomatic Syntactic Constructions and Language Learning

This article explores the influence of idiomatic syntactic constructions (i.e., constructions whose phrase structure rules violate the rules that underlie the construction of other kinds of sentences in the language) on the acquisition of phrase structure. In Experiment 1, participants were trained on an artificial language generated from hierarchical phrase structure rules. Some participants w...

a synchronic and diachronic approach to the change route of address terms in the two recent centuries of persian language

terms of address as an important linguistics items provide valuable information about the interlocutors, their relationship and their circumstances. this study was done to investigate the change route of persian address terms in the two recent centuries including three historical periods of qajar, pahlavi and after the islamic revolution. data were extracted from a corpus consisting 24 novels w...

Book Review: Innovation and Change in English Language Education

  It is widely accepted that today’s technological world is moving in a much more speed than the past, which requires the skill of keeping up with the pace of change. This change and innovation is a must for all organizations. According to Shen (2008, p. 73), this change is trickier in the educational context, where "the nature of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of those i...

Language Change and Language Contact

Language acquisition and language change.

Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. I outline one approach to language acquisition, based on children finding cues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to ...