This article takes a critical look through the lens of linguistics at the “always-speaking” principle in law — an influential principle that is recited in materials on legislative drafting as the justification for using the present tense, adopted in many common-law jurisdictions as a principle of interpretation, and accepted as a foundation for the linguistic analysis of the use of tense in statutes. The article concludes that the principle is an inadequate basis for interpreting or analysing statutes, for at least two reasons: the interpretive results that the principle is intended to support are explainable in terms of widely accepted principles in the analysis of tense, without any need to posit special principles that apply only to statutes; and the interpretations that would be required if the always-speaking principle were taken seriously would in many cases probably be regarded as unnatural by native speakers of English.

This contribution explores a methodological problem in language acquisition studies. Much research in language acquisition has shown that children use statistical learning as a strategy in the acquisition of their native language (Saffran et al. 1996 and many others). Frequency of occurrence is also believed to determine the order of acquisition of phonological structures in the construction of the grammar (Boersma and Levelt 2000, Levelt et al. 2000, van de Weijer and Sloos 2013). How do we obtain the relevant frequency information for acquisition studies?

Ideally, we should take into account children's speech or child-directed speech (CDS), depending on the purposes of the investigation. Investigations into the construction of the lexicon and acquisition of the grammar depend on the input, the perception, and the lexical storage of the child, and therefore, frequency data on CDS seem most desirable.

Cet article étudie la dérivation de deux types de dépendances Aʹ – les relatives et les structures à dislocation à gauche – dans le cadre du programme minimaliste. Le mandarin montre qu'une relative contenant soit un pronom résomptif soit une lacune et une dislocation à lacune sont dérivées par l'opération Accorder et sont soumises aux contraintes de localité et qu'une dislocation résomptive est dérivée par Match sans conditions d’îlot. «Transferts multiples» et « épellations multiples » sont légitimés dans les dépendances établies par Accorder mais pas dans celles dérivées par Match. Le choix du mécanisme dérivationnel dépend de l'interprétabilité des traits formels attachés à la sonde ainsi qu’à la cible dans une dépendance Aʹ.

This paper offers an account of the different behaviour of prenorninal constituents such as his and su in the examples in (1) which are associated with one of the thematic roles assigned by the nouns picture and foto respectively. I argue that the prenominal element su is base-generated as a clitic adjoined to a nominal head in Spanish, whereas his in English attains its prenominal position via NP-movement to a nominal specifier.

This article aims to account for why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic lack a copular verb. In contrast to previous accounts which attribute the absence of the copula to some defect of present tense, I claim that a verbless sentence does not take a copula because its nominais do not need structural Case. The proposed analysis argues that structural Case is licensed by a “Verbal Case” feature on the relevant Case-checking heads, and assumes the Visibility Condition. The present analysis is based on a unique interaction between tense and word order, and on the observation that verbless sentences are finite clauses composed of a topic and a predicate, as well as on the observation that they do not involve licensing of structural Case.

The status of subject as a linguistic universals is commonly assumed. For example, the classification of the word order of a language as SVO, SOV, etc. presupposes the universal occurrence of subject; many language universale such as Mithun’s (1984) hierarchy for noun incorporation are stated in terms of subject; and, some theories such as Relational Grammar take subject as a primitive.

This paper examines a previously identified but so far imprecisely defined split in the historical phonology of Resígaro (Arawakan). I argue that this development was a simple case of allophonic redistribution or primary split, in which word-final allophones of *a merged with ɯ. However, comparative data offers no evidence for the existence of ɯ before the operation of the split in question. This apparent paradox can be resolved by the plausible hypothesis that ɯ entered the language via the massive influx of morphemes from Bora, an unrelated language of the Bora-Muinane family. Only after that were some contextual allophones of *a merged with ɯ. This is the first solidly justified case of loan phonology in Resígaro and it provides further support to the hypothesis that Bora influence on Resígaro is not a result of the language's obsolescent status.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the various lexical and syntactic properties of the reduplicated adverbial form benben in Quebec French. It can be observed that this form differs syntactically from its Standard French synonyms beaucoup and très. Benben can indeed appear with various lexical categories: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, transitive and intransitive verbs. Moreover, in many contexts, its use is sensitive to the presence of verbal negation, rather than to that of constituent negation. In comparison with other Quebec French quantifiers, benben is very flexible. It can be used in both negative and positive contexts and, as an adverbial form, it can appear in various positions in the sentence.

In a recent article in Language, Sol Saporta pointed out that structural linguists had, for the most part, analysed sequences of phonemes but had ignored the frequencies of combinations. He goes on to produce an interesting and workable hypothesis, i.e. “the average frequency of a consonant cluster is a function of the difference between the phonemes in the cluster; low frequencies are expected for clusters which are either extremely similar or extremely dissimilar; high frequencies are expected for clusters which are at neither extreme.” What should be demonstrated by scholars of linguistics is that the frequency of these combinations is not haphazard.

The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scholarly literature. The evidence demonstrates that Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to instantiate the prototype fully. This signifies, in turn, that, as far as their phonetics and morphology are concerned, Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to be extra-systematic.

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) claims that L2 beginners use the perfective morpheme first with telic predicates (e.g., ‘arrive’, ‘build the house’) and only later with atelic ones (e.g., ‘know’, ‘work’). In contrast, the Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis (LUH) claims that beginners cannot represent the lexical aspect of L2 predicates (hence the telic vs. atelic distinction), because this distinction is a separate component of verb meaning. To investigate whether L2 learners distinguish between telic and atelic predicates, this study compares the responses from 299 L2 Italian learners (with different L1 backgrounds) and responses from 91 native speakers (NS) to the “for/in + time span” adverbial test (Dowty 1979). The analysis shows that native speakers and L2 learners’ responses to the adverbial test diverge significantly, with learners’ proficiency and – to a lesser extent – L1 modulating their ratings. The results suggest that native speakers and beginning-intermediate L2 learners might not represent telicity alike, either because L2 aspectual competence is still developing or because beginning learners rely on the semantic representations of their L1. These findings support the predictions of the LUH and suggest caution when trying to assess learners’ aspectual representations.

This study investigates how learners with distinct native dialects, Cuban (CS) and Peninsular Spanish (PS), produce the English vowels æ, Λ, a/. Experiment 1 compares the native vowels along several acoustic parameters to determine the extent of the cross-dialectal differences, and Experiment 2 assesses the differences in L2 production of the same speakers who are also advanced learners of English. More fronted and shorter vowels are predicted for PS versus CS. As such, L2 /æ, A, a/ are expected to be more fronted in the interlanguage of PS learners as compared to CS learners. Dialect-specific patterns of assimilation are highlighted. PS learners produce æ, Λ, a/ with good spectral differences but with no duration differences whereas for CS learners /Λ, a/ overlap spectrally but are realized with different durations. Differences found in L2 production are caused by the conjoint effect of the native dialect, the input, and the learning experience.

Traditional approaches to natural language processing (NLP) can be considered construction-based. That is to say, they employ surface oriented, language specific rules, whether in the form of an Augmented Transition Network (ATN), logic grammar or some other grammar/parsing formalism. The problems of such approaches have always been apparent; they involve large sets of rules, often ad hoc, and their adequacy with respect to the grammar of the language is difficult to ensure.

The DO in “Subject DO Predicate” sentences is often associated with unexpected meaning, including contradictory uses in dialogue where DO functions as a sort of reassertive marker and in monologal contexts where a speaker short-circuits potential objections. Many instances of affirmative DO do not fit into this category, however. These involve quasi-exclamative use, non-polemical use in dialogue or gnomic confirmation. Often considered prototypical, contradictory DO represents only one possible configuration: other uses can be accounted for as paramétered variations of a single fundamental operation. Affirmative DO marks speaker endorsement. Values of affirmative DO — polemical, concessive, exclamative, etc. —are shown to result from the relation between various preconstructed subjective positions and the speaker’s own position.

As a mountaineering enthusiast who holds a life membership in the Sky Line Trail Hikers of the Canadian Rockies, as well as the 1,000-miles emblem of the companion order of Trail Riders, I have made acquaintance with persons from most of the provinces. Mentions of my lexical interests, tracing word origins, have often given rise to impromptu discussions of Canadian speech. These trail-side sessions, while interesting, have rarely proved instructive; the average Canadian is seemingly better informed about American speech than the American is about Canadian, but neither is familiar with the background of his own language. A minority were of the opinion that Canadian English is essentially British English, citing the prevalence of -our and -re endings, as in labour and centre, together with such variants as analyse-analyze, licence-license, cheque-check, and pyjamas-pajamas. A Kansan observed, “Canucks say ‘in hospital’, just like in British whodunits, and not ‘in the hospital’, like we do.“

The findings presented here are part of a pilot study of the vocabulary of English-speaking residents of Alberta. The study was carried out in 1953 and 1954 with the aid of a number of my students who took the responsibility of getting written answers to several hundred copies of a brief questionnaire. The items in the questionnaire were of a general nature; although, since Alberta is greatly concerned with agriculture, some emphasis was placed on terms connected with the farm and with life on the farm. All informants were notified of the purpose for which the answers would be used, and they were asked to give as their answers the names of buildings and so on which they would normally use in their everyday work and talk. Sample questions follow: What command do you give to make a horse turn to the left? What do you call the buildings where pigs are kept?