According to the usage-based approaches, language develops in relation to the communicative contexts in which it unfolds. Usage-based theorists start from the assumption that children experience language as part of social interactions and that constructions are the basic units of language. This means that children learn language in the form of sentence level constructions embedded in communicat...

This paper suggests that the theory of A-chain maturation can account for an asymmetry in the development of “full” unaccusatives and passives in Japanese. We show that the early success with full unaccusatives is due to the availability of unergative misanalysis. The nominative case marker drop phenomenon and the syntactic analysis of the full unaccusative also support this hypothesis. We clai...

The stipulative nature of the (generalized) EPP – the requirement that certain functional heads have filled specifiers – has led to numerous attempts to subsume its effects within other properties of natural language (e.g. Fukui & Speas 1986; Bošković 1997, 2002, 2007; Martin 1999; Grohmann et al. 2000; Epstein & Seely 2006; Landau 2007; Bjorkman & Zeijlstra 2014; Richards 2014; McFadden & Sund...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

In this paper we discuss a change in the auxiliary selectional pattern of Brazilian Venetan, heritage Italo-Romance variety spoken southern Brazil. Venetan varieties display default form past participle constructions with postverbal subjects and fully agreeing preverbal subjects: is true both for homeland language, northern Italy, as well under analysis paper, A crucial difference emerges unacc...

In Hebrew, European Portuguese, Palestinian Arabic, and Spanish, both SV and VS orders are possible. However, when children acquire these languages, they do not use the whole array of word orders in their language at the first stage of sentence construction. Interestingly, their word order preference in the early stage of acquisition differs in the different languages: in Hebrew and European Po...