Recent research has examined the early stages of language development in signed and spoken language. In this paper we discuss claims that, in the timing of early language milestones, there is an advantage for the acquisition of signed languages. In particular, we will review the evidence that the emergence of the first signs and of the first two-sign combinations is precocious in signing children as compared to the appearance of the first words and of the first two-word strings in speaking children. We conclude that the evidence for early emergence of the first signs deserves continued attention, but that the evidence for early syntax in signing children is not at all compelling. Finally, we discuss the import of a short-lived sign advantage in early language acquisition, in terms of understanding maturational timing mechanisms more generally. Specifically, we address the question of whether or not a single timing mechanism underlies early milestones in the acquisition of both vocabulary and syntax.

X-bar theory is widely regarded as a substantive theory of phrase structure properties in natural languages. In this paper we will demonstrate that a formalization of its content reveals very little substance in its claims. We state and discuss six conditions that encapsulate the claims of X-bar theory: Lexicality—each nonterminal is a projection of a preterminal; Succession—each Xn+1 dominates an Xn for all n = 0; Uniformity—all maximal projections have the same bar-level; Maximality—all nonheads are maximal projections; Centrality—the start symbol is a maximal projection; and Optionality—all and only nonheads are optional. We then consider recent proposals to ‘eliminate’ base components from transformational grammars and to reinterpret X-bar theory as a set of universal constraints holding for all languages at D-structure, arguing that this strategy fails. We show that, as constraints on phrase-structure rule systems, the X-bar conditions have hardly any effect on the descriptive power of grammars, and that the principles with the most chance of making some descriptive difference are the least adhered to in practice. Finally, we reconstruct X-bar theory in a way that makes no reference to the notion of bar-level but instead makes the notion ‘head of the central one.

Two curious phenomena which have to this point been treated separately in the literature are seen to be consequences of the same general interpretive mechanism. We propose that the theory of focus not only accounts for the ‘definiteness restriction’ with respect to material extraposed from NP, but also contributes crucially to an explanation for the variable acceptability of sentences containing extractions from extraposed PPs.

Proposals for foot structure in Japanese have hitherto been limited to versification and to mechanisms for assigning tone that bear little resemblance to stress feet. This is not surprising, since the metrical foot has thus far been associated with stress, which Japanese appears to lack. I argue here that a bimoraic foot whose properties are similar to those of stress feet in other languages plays a significant role in Japanese morphophonology. The existence of such feet in Japanese has a number of implications, the most important of which is that it suggests that in Japanese a rhythmic system like that underlying many stress systems may coexist with the independent pitch accent system.

1. Joseph H. Greenberg's Language in the Americas (LIA; 1987) has been greeted with dismay by many specialists in Amerindian linguistics1 (cf. Chafe 1987, Campbell 1988, Adelaar 1989), and defended by the author in a reply to Campbell in Language 65.1 (1989).