Soft locality restrictions in negative concord: Evidence from the French future polarity effect.

This paper provides new evidence that syntactic principles that are proposed to explain the (un)grammaticality of a sentence can also hold in sociolinguistic variation. In particular, we argue that two puzzling frequency patterns involving negation in French-the on negative concord and the on future temporal reference-are deeply related and are both derived from the sensitivity of syntactic agreement to "soft" locality constraints. Recent quantitative studies of future temporal reference reveal that, although all negative items are subject to the polarity effect in Laurentian French, does not give rise to the polarity effect in Parisian French.

The Acquisition of Noun and Verb Categories by Bootstrapping From a Few Known Words: A Computational Model.

While many studies have shown that toddlers are able to detect syntactic regularities in speech, the learning mechanism allowing them to do this is still largely unclear. In this article, we use computational modeling to assess the plausibility of a context-based learning mechanism for the acquisition of nouns and verbs. We hypothesize that infants can assign basic semantic features, such as "is-an-object" and/or "is-an-action," to the very first words they learn, then use these words, the , to ground proto-categories of nouns and verbs.