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...

When creating a resume, start each descriptor with an action verb. Watch the tenses when using action verbs; if you are no longer involved with a position, the descriptors for it should be in past tense, and vice versa. Accomplishments achieved attained convinced expanded expedited founded improved increased initiated introduced invented pioneered reduced (losses) resolved (problems) restored r...

study, taking truly independent ratings to see which verbs participants considered to be denominal or deverbal (i.e. exocentric or not). The results of this new experiment were clear. The semantic similarity (or otherwise) of verbs-incontext to ordinary irregular usage predicted the acceptability of past-tense forms. Whether or not verbs were perceived to be exocentric was irrelevant to this. I...

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexi...

The translation of email presents unique challenges to translation systems. At the same time, features peculiar to email constitute new sources of information for these systems. A corpus of Japanese email is examined and its particular characteristics discussed: visual formatting, use and nature of openings and closings, visual devices for capturing aspects of speech (e.g., nonstandard punctuat...

This article reviews the existing literature on the diagnostic accuracy of two grammatical accuracy measures for differentiating children with and without language impairment (LI) at preschool and early school age based on language samples. The first measure, the finite verb morphology composite (FVMC), is a narrow grammatical measure that computes children's overall accuracy of four verb tense...