This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses in crosslinguistic perspective. Using a representative sample of forty languages, the author shows that the ordering of main and adverbial clauses correlates with the position of the subordinator in the subordinate clause. In languages in which adverbial clauses have a final subordinator, adverbial clauses tend to precede the main clause, whereas in languages in which adverbial clauses are marked by an initial subordinator, adverbial clauses commonly occur in both sentence-initial and sentence-final position. In the latter language type, the position of an adverbial clause varies with its meaning or function: conditional clauses precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses, which in turn are more often preposed than causal, result, and purpose clauses. The distributional patterns are explained in terms of competing motivations; it is suggested that they arise from the interaction between structural and discourse-pragmatic factors.

In Hoan, nouns and verbs can be pluralized. This article investigates various syntactic and semantic aspects of plurality in Hoan: first, the formation of plurals of inalienable nouns, then, how the plurals of verbs (termed PLURACTIONAL VERBS) are formed in much the same way as the plurals of inalienable nouns. The phenomenon of pluractional verbs strongly supports the event argument analysis of verbal semantics.

The applicative is a construction in which a verb bears a particular morpheme which licenses an oblique, or non-core, argument that would not otherwise be considered a part of the verb's argument structure. Abaza, a Northwest Caucasian language, has an applicative construction which differs systematically from applicative constructions reported in many other languages. The properties of the Abaza applicative construction include the ability of both transitive and intransitive verbs to host applicative prefixes, the stability of the underlying argument structure despite the presence of applicatives (i.e. the underlying direct object is not demoted to an oblique argument), the ability of a single verb complex to host multiple applicatives, and the use of additional agreement morphology in the verbal complex corresponding to applied object(s), beyond the normal agreement requirements of the verb. This paper attempts to present a thorough description of the applicative construction in Abaza, as well as a brief analysis along the lines of Baker (1988).

The hypothesis that children's errors in interpreting adjunct PRO clauses are due to their use of a nominal structure was tested in two act-out experiments. Four- to six-year-old English-speaking children permitted a by phrase inside an adjunct clause containing an intransitive verb to be interpreted as agentive, and they gave such an interpretation for a construction for which a nominal analysis is not permitted in the adult grammar (when PRO clauses). This behavior can be accounted for if children have knowledge of general principles governing the interpretation of nominal and PRO constructions, and use a nominal analysis in interpreting adjunct clauses. In the second experiment, children distinguish between constructions that are unambiguously nominal and those that are ambiguous between a nominal and PRO structure, permitting agentive readings of by more frequently in the former case. This argues that adjunct PRO may be acquired by some children at a point during the preschool years. Overall the results fit a view of acquisition in which the language learner actively analyzes the input data, using knowledge of general grammatical principles, and is not narrowly bound by his or her current knowledge of the lexicon of the language.

The authors investigate how morphological relationships between inflected word forms are represented in the mental lexicon, focusing on paradigmatic relations between regularly inflected word forms and relationships between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We present results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating German adjectives (which are inflected for case, number, and gender) and the so-called strong verbs of German, which have different stem forms when inflected for person, number, tense, or mood.

Evidence from three lexical-decision experiments indicates that regular affixes are stripped off from their stems for processing purposes. It will be shown that this holds for both unmarked and marked stem forms. Another set of experiments revealed priming effects between different paradigmatically related affixes and between different stem forms of the same lexeme.

We will show that associative models of inflection do not capture these findings, and we explain our results in terms of combinatorial models of inflection in which regular affixes are represented in inflectional paradigms and stem variants are represented in structured lexical entries. We will also argue that the morphosyntactic features of stems and affixes form abstract underspecified entries. The experimental results indicate that the human language processor makes use of these representations.

Spoken language is not produced in a continuous flow; it is broken up into phrases. An understanding of phrase-boundary placement is critical for comprehension and of great importance in text-to-speech technology. The knowledge that speakers use to determine phrasal boundaries has been attributed in the literature to many seemingly competing factors, syntactic, semantic, phonological, discourse, and pragmatic. This article reports on a study of the boundaries of a single type of data, clause-final prepositional phrases (PPs). The study was done to improve the phrasing of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The syntactic constituency of the PP and its length as measured in accented syllables account for an overwhelming majority of the data. The few exceptions to this account fall into natural categories of semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, which suggests they have the status of marked forms.