Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Filling a gap in the literature currently available on the topic, this edited collection is the first examination of the interplay between urbanization, language variation and language change in fifteen major Arab cities. The Arab world presents very different types and degrees of urbanization, from well established old capital-cities such as Cairo to new emerging capital-cities such as Amman or Nouakchott, these in turn embedded in different types of national construction. It is these urban settings which raise questions concerning the dynamics of homogenization/differentiation and the processes of standardization due to the coexistence of competing linguistic models. Topics investigated include: History of settlement The linguistic impact of migration The emergence of new urban vernaculars Dialect convergence and divergence Code-switching, youth language and new urban culture Arabic in the Diaspora Arabic among non-Arab groups. Containing a broad selection of case studies from across the Arab world and featuring contributions from leading urban sociolinguistics and dialectologists, this book presents a fresh approach to our understanding of the interaction between language, society and space. As such, the book will appeal to the linguist as well as to the social scientist in general.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

other aspects of developing grammars. And this is, indeed, what the contributions to this volume do. Parameterization of functional categories may, however, be understood in different ways, even if one shares the dual assumptions that substantive elements (verbs, nouns, etc. ) are present in all grammars and that X-bar principles are part of the grammatical knowledge available to the child prior to language-specific learning processes. From these assumptions it follows that the child should, from early on, be able to construct projections on the basis of these elements. The role of functional categories, however, may still be interpreted differently. One possibility, first suggested by Radford (1986, 1990) and by Guilfoyle and Noonan (1988), is that children must discover which functional categories (FC) need to be implemented in the grammar of the language they are acquiring. Another possibility, first explored by Hyams (1986), is that a specific category is present in developing grammars but that parameter values are set in a way deviating from the target adult grammar, corresponding, however, to options realized in other adult systems. A third option would be that these categories might be specified differently in developing as opposed to mature grammars. All three are explored in the papers collected in this volume. Before outlining the various hypotheses in more detail, however, I would like briefly to sketch the grammatical context in which the following debate is situated. 2.

This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate in agrammatism, an acquired language disorder resulting from left hemisphere brain damage. The aim of the book is (1) to give a comprehensive account of agrammatism and outlines and critically examines the different accounts of agrammatic production and asyntactic comprehension, (2) to address morphological and structural properties of Moroccan Arabic agrammatic speech and (3) to put under scrutiny Friedmann and Grodzinsky’s (1997) syntactic account of tense and agreement in production and across modalities. The book attempts to answer two important research questions: Are tense and agreement dissociated as predicted by the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997)? Is the tense/agreement dissociation “production-specific”, or does it extend to comprehension and grammaticality judgment? A third objective of the book is to examine the comprehension abilities of four Moroccan Arabic-speaking agrammatic subjects in the light of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky, 1995 a, b). A major research question is whether or not active sentences and subject relative sentences are understood better than object relative sentences. The book takes the view the tense/agreement dissociation reported for Hebrew (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997) and German (Wenzlaff and Clahsen, 2003) can be replicated in Moroccan Arabic. However, the syntactic account as outlined in Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) cannot account for the tense/agreement dissociation as Moroccan Arabic has the agreement node above the tense node. In addition, the Trace Deletion Hypothesis cannot account for the comprehension difficulties experienced by the four Moroccan Arabic-speaking agrammatic subjects; the case is so because both subject relatives and object relatives are understood below chance level. Based on data collected through different experimental methods, it is argued that the deficit in agrammatism cannot be explained in terms of a structural account, but rather in terms of a processing account. Access to syntactic knowledge tends to be blocked; grammatical knowledge, however, is entirely intact.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 3rd Conference on Afroasiatic Languages, held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 1996. The languages discussed include (varieties of) Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Chaha, Wolof, and Old Egyptian.