This dissertation is about the structure of temporal semantics and children’s acquisition of temporal language. It argues for the importance of investigating semantics both at the abstract level of linguistic structures and at the concrete level of the time-course of acquisition, as these two levels provide natural constraints for each other. With respect to semantics, it provides a computation...

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from sixteen healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes...

This study examines how the syntactic complexity of English conditionals and first language transfer influence Chinese ESL learners’ acquisition order of conditionals. The differences in English and Chinese conditional constructions are presented in the paper. Brown’s (1973) Cumulative Complexity principle is employed to determine the syntactic complexity of six conditionals: present factual, p...

The relevance of this study is due to the importance Vasiliy Adodurov’s Anfangs-Gründe der Russischen Sprache as first academic grammar Russian language written by a scholar and published in Russia. aim article show innovations grammatical views relation his with Western European Slavic traditions conceptual presentation name verb. material research Adodurov comparison grammars H.W.Ludolph, I.W...

BACKGROUND verb acquisition. AIM to verify quantitative and qualitative verb diversity in the spontaneous speech of Brazilian Portuguese-speaking preschoolers and verb acquisition from 2 to 4 years of age. METHOD participants were sixty preschoolers equally matched on gender and age, divided into three groups: GI (2-year-old children), GII (3-year-old children) and GIII (4-year-old children...

The emerging function of verb in ections in German language acquisition is modeled with a connectionist network. A network that is initially presented only with a semantic representation of sentences uses the in ectional verb ending -t to mark those sentences that are low in transitivity, whereas all other verb endings occur randomly. This behavior matches an early stage in German language acqu...

In this paper I investigate the alternation between VO and OV word order in spoken North Sami, based on data from LIA Sápmi – Sámegiela hállangiellakorpus. My results show that general is most frequent order. However, also find many instances of SAuxOV my material, particularly sentences with periphrastic verb forms where main infinitive (that is, modal constructions) object a pronoun. addition...

It is generally held that clausal temporal, aspectual and modal features, when encoded morphologically, are expressed by or on clausal heads. However nominals and modifiers within NP can also be inflected for tense, aspect and modal features interpreted with respect to the clausal predication rather than with respect to the nominal argument itself. Such nominals (and dependents within NP) there...