Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. Marge pulled the box to Homer/Marge pulled Homer the box). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a negative correlation was observed between verb frequency and the acceptability of errors, across all age groups. Adults additionally displayed sensitivity to narrow-range semantic constraints on the alternation, rejecting double-object dative uses of novel verbs consistent with prepositional-dative-only classes and vice versa. Adults also provided evidence for the psychological validity of a proposed morphophonological constraint prohibiting Latinate verbs from appearing in the double-object dative. These findings are interpreted in the light of a recent account of argument-structure acquisition, under which children retreat from error by incrementally learning the semantic, phonological, and pragmatic properties associated with particular verbs and particular construction slots.

Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like system. The resulting syntactic differences defy analyses within a widely-assumed architecture of Universal Grammar and support the alternative adopted by Bresnan & Kanerva 1989.

This article delineates and analyzes the syntactic and semantic parameters of variation exhibited by English filler-gap constructions. It demonstrates that a detailed, fully explicit account of the observed variation is available within a framework embracing the notion ‘grammatical construction’. This account, which explicates similarities and differences among topicalization, interrogatives, relatives, exclamatives, and comparative correlatives in terms of linguistic types and hierarchical constraint inheritance, is articulated in detail within the framework of sign-based construction grammar (SBCG), a version of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) integrating key insights from Berkeley construction grammar. The results presented here stand as a challenge to any analysis incorporating transformational operations, especially proposals couched within Chomsky's ‘Minimalist program’.

Everyone's life has a pivotal moment, a moment when, had things gone otherwise, we would be someone other than the person we turned out to be. In the case of Ken Hale that moment may have been in the life, or rather the death, of his grandfather. A Dartmouth alumnus, class of 1903, and, at the time of his death, chairman of the Illinois Bell telephone system, Floyd Orlin Hale suffered a fatal stroke while attending a Dartmouth-Yale football game. The inheritance occasioned by that untimely death enabled Ken's father to do something he had always wanted to do—exchange commercial banking in Chicago for ranching in Arizona. Ken Hale was six years old when Robert Locke Hale and his wife, Mary Adelaide, moved from Chicago to a ranch in Canelo, Arizona.