Light Warlpiri is a newly emerged Australian mixed language that systematically combines nominal structure from (Australian, Pama-Nyungan) with verbal Kriol (an English-lexified Creole) and English, additional innovations in the auxiliary system. Lexical items are drawn both two sources, English. The verb system interesting because of questions raised about how it elements its sources. Most ste...

The ability to comprehend and produce phrasal verbs, as lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together, is an important part of language learning. This study investigates the effect of ‘conceptual metaphor awareness’, as a newly developed technique in Cognitive Linguistics, on learning phrasal verbs by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To meet this objective, two intact ho...

one of the main dichotomies in syntactic analyses deals with the distinction between lexical and functional categories. functional categories gain in stature as the generative grammar moves ahead. they come into play in explaining the derivation stages of phrases and sentences. the present study critically evaluates different approaches to the role and function of one of these functional catego...

Scope and semimodal verbs: two approaches In this paper I focus on scope phenomena connected with semimodal (and modal) verbs and mainly on the syntactic behaviour of these groups of verbs. One important question is: why can semimodal verbs (and modal verbs in epistemic use) not have perfect and future tense forms? Taking among other things Reichenbach’s tense system as a starting point I try t...

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexi...

Distinguishing between statements and questions is an important ability for language learners. In English and many other languages, questions generally involve syntactic structures and word order patterns that are different from statements. For example, in English, questions often begin with whwords (e.g. who, what, where, etc.) and auxiliary verbs switch positions with subjects (compare I see ...