The Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi uses a combination of simple and complex verb forms to encode a range of tense-aspect distinctions. Whilst simple verb forms comprise of a single inflected verb, complex forms involve an auxiliary and a lexical main verb. This paper presents an account of auxiliary constructions in Rangi from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax. Dynamic Syntax (Kempson, Meyer-Vi...

Tense and aspect, together with mood and modality, usually form the entangled structure of a complex verb. They are often hard to translate by machines, because of both syntactic and semantic differences between languages. This problem seriously affects upon the generation process because those verb components in interlingua are hardly rearranged correctly in the target language. We propose her...

The role of lexical frequency, telicity & phonological factors on past tense production in children with SLI & their typically developing peers. ii ii ABSTRACT Limited research is available about how lexical and phonological verb properties interact with past tense production by children. Frequency of the inflected form and phonotactic probability might serve as input-driven alternatives to pre...

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder characterised by morpho-syntactic errors in the absence of neurological trauma, cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, or motor-articulatory disorders. Among the hypotheses that have argued for SLI as an impairment at the linguistic level, rather than at the cognitive or perceptual level, there is a debate as t...

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge...

In 1983, when I attended my first linguistics course, taught by one Professor Rüdiger Zimmermann, Joan Bybee and Carol Moder published an article on „Morphological classes as natural categories“ in Language. In this article they argued that prototype theory can be applied to morphological classes, in particular ablaut classes in English verb morphology. Their experimental results indicated that...

This paper discusses how predicate-initial (VOS) order in Malagasy is derived, and the implications of this derivation for general theories of word order. Malagasy clauses are comprised of a predicate phrase followed by a constituent here called the TRIGGER, which occupies the specifier of an A’-position (provisionally labelled TopP). I argue against an analysis where TopP projects its specifie...

PURPOSE This study investigated whether past tense use could differentiate children with language impairment (LI) from their typically developing (TD) peers when English is children's second language (L2) and whether L2 children's past tense profiles followed the predictions of Bybee's (2007) usage-based network model. METHOD A group of L2 children with LI (L2-LI) and a matched group of L2-TD...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgement tasks with seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched control subjects examining verb finiteness marking and verb-second (V2) placement. The patients were found to be selectively impaired in tense marking in the face of preserved mood and agreement marking. Moreover, our results revealed that ...

Here I present a case study of change in the complex verb morphology of the Nyikina language of Northwestern Australia. I describe changes which lead to reanalysis of underlying forms while preserving much of the inherited phonological material. The changes presented here do not fit into previous typologies of morphological change. Nyikina lost the distinction between past and present, and in d...