This book presents a general overview of our current knowledge of language development in children. All the principal strands of language development are covered, including phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic development; bilingualism; precursors to language development in infancy; and the language development of children with developmental disabilities, including children with specific language impairment. Written by leading international authorities, each chapter summarises clearly and lucidly our current state of knowledge, and carefully explains and evaluates the theories which have been proposed to account for children's development in that area.

These conference proceedings examine various aspects of formal linguistics. Individual topics covered include: sequences of tense, intentionality and scope; empty consonants and direct prosody; syllable weight and quantity in Dutch; finite control on modern Persian; and copular sentences.

This volume provides a comprehensive view of the current issues in contemporary syntactic theory. Written by an international assembly of leading specialists in the field, these 2 original articles serve as a useful reference for various areas of grammar. Contains 23 articles written by an international assembly of specialists in the field. The lucidly written articles grant accessibility to crucial areas of syntactic theory. Contrasting theories are represented. Contains an informative introduction and extensive bibliography which serves as a reference tool for both students and professional linguists.

1. BACKGROUND This volume is one of three which emerged from the Conference on Knowledge and Language, held from May 21-May 25, 1989, at the occasion of the 37 5th anniversary of the University of Groningen. Studying the relation between knowledge and language, one may distinguish two different lines of inquiry, one focussing on language as a body of knowledge, the other on language as a vehicle of knowledge. Approaching language as a body of knowledge one faces questions concerning its structure, and the relation with other types of knowledge. One will ask, then, how language is acquired and to what extent the acquisition of language and the structure of the language faculty model relevant aspects of other cognitive capacities. If language is approached as a vehicle for knowledge, the question comes up what enables linguistic entities to represent facts about the world. To what extent does this reply on conventional aspects of mean ings? Is it possible for language, when used non-conventionally as in metaphors, to convey intersubjective knowledge? If so (and it does seem to be the case), one may wonder what makes this possible. The aim of this conference was to investigate the role of conceptual structure in cognitive processes, exploring it from the perspectives of philosophy of language, linguistics, political philosophy, psychology, liter ary theory, aesthetics, and philosophy of science. The themes of these three volumes reflect the themes of the conference.

This is a collection of 11 analytical and empirical studies on the process of second language acquisition, probing a wide array of issues, from transfer appropriate processing to L2 default processing strategies, among hearing or deaf learners of a variety of target languages.

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.