This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in three children acquiring English. It was found that (1) children start using past inflections predominantly with achievement verbs, and progressive inflections with activity verbs; and (2) the same distributional bias is found in the speech by caretakers addressed to children. The result shows that despite claims to the contrary, early development of tense-aspect morphology is strongly influenced by the inherent aspect of the verbs, and suggests that the pattern of the development should be attributed to input and to prototype formation by children.

Some researchers have claimed that WH-movement in ASL is rightward, contrary to the apparent universality of leftward WH-movement. In contrast to this claim, we argue that WH-movement in ASL is to a leftward specifier of CP. We account for the occurrence of rightward WH-elements by independently motivated syntactic and discourse factors which lead to the appearance of WH-elements in sentence- or discourse-final positions—not by rightward WH-movement. Our analysis provides an account for a variety of ASL direct and indirect WH-questions and is in accord with cross-linguistic generalizations.

A current controversy in phonological theory concerns the explanation of crosslinguistic tendencies. It is often assumed that crosslinguistic tendencies are explained by mental bias: a pattern is common because it is favored by learners/speakers. But work by Blevins and colleagues in EVOLUTIONARY PHONOLOGY has argued that many crosslinguistic tendencies can be explained without positing such bias. This would mean that crosslinguistic tendencies cannot be unproble-matically used as evidence about the mental machinery that humans bring to learning and using language. In response, many researchers have looked at different types of data, such as processing, learning of real and artificial languages, and literary invention. This article presents another type of data: extension of native-language phonology to words with novel phonological structure, in this case infixation in Tagalog into loanwords with novel initial consonant clusters. The data come from a written corpus and a survey. Tagalog speakers' treatment of these clusters parallels Fleischhacker's crosslinguistic findings of cluster splittability. This article argues that explaining the data requires attributing to Tagalog speakers phonetic knowledge and a bias about how to apply that knowledge.

In this article we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by plastic flower, stuffed animal and kosher bacon, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to nonterminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings of any of their syntactic constituents. We argue that extensionalist semantics, on which the meaning of an expression is a function from domains to extensions in those domains, cannot provide an adequate account of the semantics of these expressions, and that supplementation with a theory of pragmatic interpretation does not improve the situation. We show how our account explains the intensionality and the productivity of these expressions.