In so-called ‘Bracketing Paradoxes’, it seems to be necessary to assign two incompatible constituent structures to a single expression. The paper outlines empirical and conceptual difficulties with three main current approaches and discusses in detail the problem of ‘paradoxical’ expressions relating to people, such as transformational grammarian, theoretical linguist, serial composer, and Southern Dane. It is shown that such expressions can be formed productively by means of a process of analogical back-formation defined strictly over existing entries in the permanent lexicon, a novel type of productive word formation process.

This paper uses spontaneous and imitated speech data from 50 Mexican-American preschoolers to demonstrate that children learning Spanish as a first language learn rules for assigning stress, as opposed to simply memorizing stress on a word-by-word basis. From a developmental perspective, this finding is taken as an indication that children's propensity to hypothesize linguistic rules is so strong as to take effect even when rules are not needed to produce correct forms and are obscured by large numbers of exceptional forms. From a theoretical perspective, the acquisition data are used to support the metrical theory of stress advanced by Harris 1983 and Den Os & Kager 1986, and to suggest that future theories take into account degrees of irregularity among different irregular stress types.

This study is an investigation of the structural relationships between spoken and written Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, a Polynesian language spoken in a restrictedly literate society in the Central Pacific. The results of a factor analysis of the frequency of co-occurrence of 42 linguistic features across a computerized corpus of naturalistic spoken and written texts show that three dimensions must be identified to account for variation between Nukulaelae registers: attitudinal vs. authoritative discourse; informational vs. interactional focus; and rhetorical manipulation vs. structural complexity. Contrary to claims advanced for English and tacitly for speaking and writing in general, spoken Tuvaluan is not necessarily more involved, less complex, and more context-dependent than written Tuvaluan. These characteristics are a function of the communicative norms at play in each register. The structural relationships of spoken and written language must be explained in terms of the social context of orality and literacy in different literacy traditions, rather than the cognitive demands of language production and comprehension in the spoken and written modes.