A recurring hypothesis about the agreement phenomena generalized as closest‐conjunct agreement takes this pattern to result from reduced clausal conjunction, simply displaying the agreement of the verb with the nonconjoined subject of the clause whose content survives ellipsis (Aoun, Benmamoun & Sportiche 1994, 1999; see also Wilder 1997). Closest‐conjunct agreement is the dominant agreement pattern in the South Slavic languages Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. A natural question is whether closest‐conjunct agreement in these varieties may indeed be analyzed as entirely derived from conjunction reduction. In this article, we report on two experiments conducted to test this. The results reject the hypothesis as far as these languages are concerned, thereby upholding the relevance of models developed to account for closest‐conjunct agreement within theories of agreement.
This article presents an overview of classification and taxonomic arrangement of abbreviations in English military terminology and analyzed from two perspectives -orthographic and morphological. Previous works in this field provide sometimes conflicting categorizations, thus showing a need for a more consistent approach and classification. The work aims to provide an outline of what a typical military abbreviation consists of and how it is created. The properties of abbreviations are analyzed in terms of their length, the length of their source phrases, source phrase elements used and omitted in the creation of abbreviations, and the elements used in their creation, i.e. initials and splinters. The abbreviations are grouped according to several criteria.
This paper aims to discuss the two main approaches to language acquisition and present the main ideas behind the nativist and the usage-based account. The concomitant argument between the two sides has been present in linguistics ever since the proposal of innateness was provided by the paradigm of mainstream generative grammar (Chomsky 1965). In order to contribute to the ongoing discussion, we will attempt to outline the main challenges that the both theoretical strands are faced with and provide an overview of syntactic evidence provided by linguists whose work was devoted to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition. Our goal is to analyze the insights provided by the phenomena such as syntactic bootstrapping, poverty of the stimulus, multiple argument realizations and non-canonical syntactic constructions and argue that integrating these findings into a usage-based framework (Tomasello 2000(Tomasello , 2003(Tomasello & 2009 or various instances of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995 & 1996, Fillmore Kay & Fillmore 1999, van Trijp 2016, Steels 2011, inter alia) provides a more plausible and comprehensive explanation of the processes responsible for language acquisition.
Even though the number of studies focused on English collocations has proliferated in the past twenty years, there is still considerable disagreement over a single unitary definition of collocations (Leśniewska, 2006, p. 1; Barfield & Gyllstad, 2009, p. 23), which is why the distinction between collocations, idioms and free word combinations is relatively blurry. Collocations play a major role in foreign language acquisition as they increase the language proficiency of the speaker. This paper is a continuation of the research on acquisition of English collocations as a part of an LSP course, conducted among the native speakers of Croatian in June 2013. The conducted analysis was intended to determine to what extent the general English language proficiency affects the knowledge of collocations in the LSP and how and to which extent the congruence of collocations affects the types of errors in translation tasks. Since the previous research showed that productive (translation) tasks pose a bigger challenge for language acquirers than receptive skills (Mustapić & Malenica, 2013), this paper has provided a detailed analysis of translation errors. The results show a need for didactic improvements in terms of new teaching materials and exercises that would develop productive skills and facilitate acquisition of collocations, both in general language and language for specific purposes.
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