When children describe an event, they do not always make use of the conventional means for marking oblique arguments. In early attempts at passive constructions, for example, children often mark oblique agents with from instead of conventional by, as in He isn't going to get hurt from those bad guys. They also make use of from instead of because, as in From I put it under there. Such uses of from typically appear prior to by and because for agency and cause. We argue that these uses of from stem from children's conceptualization of agents and causes as types of source. If so, children should extend a similar analysis to other types of source as well. There is evidence that they do, both in longitudinal records of single children and in experiments on imitations and repairs.

This paper outlines three general tendencies in semantic change, and focuses on the third: meanings tend to become increasingly situated in the speaker's subjective belief state or attitude toward the proposition. Examples are drawn from the development of epistemic, including evidential, meanings in English in three domains: modal auxiliaries (e.g. must), assertive speech act verbs (e.g. insist that), and modal adverbs (e.g. apparently). It is shown that epistemics develop from less to more strongly subjective epistemicity. The process of change involved in the development of epistemics is hypothesized to be strengthening of pragmatic inferences to relevance, not, as has sometimes been suggested, generalization, bleaching, or metaphor.

Borer & Wexler 1987 explain the apparent late acquisition of verbal passive in English and Hebrew by hypothesizing that the principle governing A-chain formation matures relatively late in language development. However, in Sesotho, a Bantu language, verbal passives are acquired early, by at least 2;8 years. This suggests either that English- and Hebrew-speaking children actually acquire the ability to form verbal passives early in language development, and that other nonmaturational factors influence its late appearance, or that the acquisition of the verbal passive is not determined by maturation, contrary to the claims of Borer & Wexler.

Among the distinctive features for consonants, we distinguish a set of primary features that are perceptually the most salient. The strength with which a primary feature is manifested in a given sound is influenced by the secondary features that co-occur with it. The features [sonorant], [continuant] and [coronal] are designated as primary, and this designation applies in all of the eight possible configurations in which they occur. The features [anterior] and [lateral] are also designated as primary, but only under restricted conditions. We examine systematically which combinations of secondary features provide maximal enhancement of the acoustic manifestations of the primary features. This analysis leads to an inventory of eleven preferred feature combinations or segments. There is a close fit between this preferred inventory and a list of the most frequently occurring segments in the languages of the world, based on Maddieson 1984. This match constitutes support for the view that the frequently occurring feature combinations in the languages of the world come about because those combinations maximize perceptual distinctiveness through the mechanism of feature enhancement. It is suggested that these concepts of enhancement and of preferred feature combinations are directly relevant to the notion of markedness.