This article addresses the debate about whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of universal grammar in constructing the grammar of a foreign or second language (L2). I investigate the interpretation of English reflexive pronouns by native speakers of Japanese and of Spanish, and the interpretation of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native speakers of English and of Chinese. The data suggest that L2 learners observe constraints defined by universal grammar, constraints which they could not have derived solely from inspection of the input data, nor from the treatment of anaphors in their native language. Thus these results support the proposal that adult learners have access to universal grammar.

This paper is concerned with the representation of stress that poetic meter refers to. Hayes 1983 argues that meter is sensitive to the metrical grid of Liberman & Prince 1977; here it is argued that meter is sensitive to the arboreal grid of Hammond 1988. This argument is made on the basis of two constraints that hold for the meter of James Thomson. These constraints are unstatable in terms of the metrical grid or metrical tree.

Rules for assigning phrasal intonation to sentences are often assumed to require an autonomous level of intonational structure', distinct from what is usually thought of as surface syntactic structure. The present paper argues that the requisite notion of structure can be subsumed under the generalized notion of surface structure that emerges from the combinatory extension of Categorial Grammar. According to this theory, the syntactic structures and the intonational structures of English are one, and can be captured in a single unified grammar. The interpretations that the grammar provides for such constituents correspond to the entities and open propositions that are concerned in certain discourse-related aspects of intonational meaning that have variously been described as ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ ‘given’ and ‘new’, and ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’.

Differences among languages offer a way of studying the process of infant adaptation from broad initial capacities to language-specific phonetic production. We designed analyses of the distribution of consonantal place and manner categories in French, English, Japanese, and Swedish to determine (1) whether systematic differences can be found in the babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds, and, if so, (2) whether these differences are related to the phonetic structure of the language spoken in the environment. Five infants from each linguistic environment were recorded under similar conditions from babbling only to the production of 25 words in a session. Although all of the infants generally made greater use of labials, dentals, and stops than of other classes of sounds, a clear phonetic selection could already be discerned in babbling, leading to statistically significant differences among the groups. This selection can be seen to arise from phonetic patterns of the ambient language. Comparison of the babbling and infant word repertoires reveals differences reflecting the motoric consequences of sequencing constraints.