The literature on grammatical skills in persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CCS) is very limited, and the need for more knowledge in this area is thus evident, in particular for speech and language therapists working with individuals with this syndrome. This case study report describes the syntactic skills of a 14-year-old Norwegian girl with CCS. The theoretical framework is construction gramma...

Linguistic acceptability judgments are a critical part of the toolkit for linguistic investigation. An implicit assumption of much work using these judgments is that the data are stable, presumably reflecting the underlying nature of grammatical representation. Here, I demonstrate that for a range of constructions — including so-called island-violating sentences, those with resumptive pronouns,...

The existence of substantive parametric variation in syntax, as characterized in Chomsky 1981, has been questioned in the more recent generative literature, notably in Borer 1984, Fukui 1986, and Chomsky 1993. This article provides converging evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for the existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky 1981, with si...

This introduction to the special issue entitled “Mechanisms of Variation in Reading Comprehension: Processes and Products” defines what is referred as process product reading comprehension. A specific model offered, five articles are discussed referencing it. Key questions are: a) How study products comprehension?; b) comprehension related?; c) Is (modulo decoding) same listening d) Are process...

Implicit type shifting, or coercion, appears to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of semantic composition may add meanings absent from the syntax in order to ensure that certain operators, e.g., the progressive, receive suitable arguments (Jackendo¤ 1997; De Swart 1998). I will argue that coercion phenomena actually provide strong support for a sign-based model o...

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension. Non-demented PD patients also experience difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be particularly impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences. Objective The aim of this study was to verify the performance of PD patients without dementia in a syntac...

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination (descriptions of local trees, e.g., a verb phrase and its daughters) have meanings. These meanings are represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees (Sag 2007, 2008). A construction defines the distinctive properties of a mode of combination that is part of the grammar of a...

In Construction Grammar, rules of syntactic combination (descriptions of local trees, e.g., a verb phrase and its daughters) have meanings. These meanings are represented by syntactic, semantic and usage features that attach to the mother or daughter nodes in these trees (Sag 2007, 2008). A construction defines the distinctive properties of a mode of combination that is part of the grammar of a...

This squib highlights a fundamental tension between the representations required for case syncretism versus priority. Case is captured with feature decomposition based on patterns established in Caha 2009. However, different priority relations, which are instantiated Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) numeral constructions and BCS German relative constructions. The proposes that this conflict can b...

Children learn language from what they hear. In dispute is what mechanisms they bring to this task. Clearly some of these mechanisms have evolved to support the human speech capacity but this leaves a wide field of possibilities open. The question I will address in my paper is whether we need to postulate an innate syntactic module that has evolved to make the learning of language structure pos...