The purpose of this study was to test the effect of manipulating verb neighbourhood density in treatment targeting the third person singular lexical affix. Using a single-subject experimental design, six pre-schoolers with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) treatment with sparse verbs or (2) treatment with dense verbs in 12 sessions. The thir...

Discourses are linguistic structures above sentence level. Discourse is nothing but a coherent sequence of sentences. Discourse analysis is concerned with coherent processing of text segments larger than the sentence and this requires something more than just the interpretation of the individual sentences. A phenomenon that operates at discourse level includes cohesion. Text is cohesive if its ...

In many languages a word may be identified, on the syntactic level, by a single vocabulary element or lexeme and a single term from each of a set of closed grammatical categories. For example, the Italian verb form canterá (possible translation: “he will sing”) may be identified, on the one hand, by a vocabulary element which we symbolize in the form CANTARE and, on the other, by the terms “Fut...

This study addresses the development of the English third-person singular present tense suffix from an interdental fricative (giveth) to an alveolar fricative (gives). Based on the PCEEC corpus, we analyze more than 20,000 examples from the time between 1417 and 1681 to determine (i) the temporal stages in which this development took place and (ii) the factors that are correlated with this chan...

The category of number is present in many languages of the world. The category encodes whether a linguistic expression refers to one or more referents and it is used primarily with nouns, e. g. car vs. cars. In addition to that, many languages possess various agreement morphemes that mark number information on elements other than nouns, such as adjectives or verbs. One question in language acqu...

Majorcan (and Balearic) Catalan dialects lack an overt inflectional morpheme for first person singular present indicative verb forms. Many of these Majorcan Catalan (MC) verbs end with the consonants of the verb root with no further inflectional vowel (represented by the morphs /u/, /o/, /e/ or /i/ in other dialects of Catalan). This divergent morphological structure is illustrated in (1) from ...

Motivations for final position and for enclitic position: On the placing of the inflected verb in historical Basque Modern Basque (and historical Basque as a whole; generalized attestations start in the 16 century) is a XXIV-type language in Greenberg’s (1966) classification; that is, a non-rigid SOV language with Gen-N order and postpositions, but with N-Adj order. In the present work, I exami...