The present paper addresses the well-known alternation type “spray paint on the wall/ spray the wall with paint” which has received extensive attention in the literature. The discussion is based on Germanic data (English, German and Norwegian) and data from one Slavic language (Bulgarian). In trying to amend previous proposals (e.g. Tenny 1987, 1994, Jackendoff 1996) and resolve issues left open in those works, the current analysis suggests that the semantic properties of both entities involved in a situation denoted by “spray” are relevant for the aspectual properties of the respective constructions headed by “spray”, i.e. both the substance sprayed, and the surface subjected to spraying. It is proposed that the aspectual properties of such constructions reside primarily in the semantic characterization, including the ontological properties, of the latter, coupled to their linguistic realization as distinct types of noun phrases.

The grammar of Finnish licenses two different types of complex numeral expressions.While the two occur in the same range of external syntactic and semantic contexts, theynevertheless exhibit striking differences in internal case-marking properties. Utilizing a sign-based, Construction Grammar approach, an analysis of the two types of numeral expressions is provided in terms of a set of closely related constructions. It is argued that the range and properties of numeral expressions as well as the interactions among them reveal a tight system of organization across constructions, expressed here in terms of a carefully formulated inheritance hierarchy. It is also argued that a close examination of the grammar of Finnish numeral expressions provides important insights into more general grammatical phenomena, including compounding, morphosyntactic feature distribution, inflectional realization, and the semantics of quantification

This paper explores the possibilities of modelling and simulating the early phases in child language acquisition using neural networks. A back-propagation model is proposed for language acquisition in a highly inflecting language, Finnish. Some preliminary tests for simulating the U-shaped behaviour of a child's language acquisition process have been performed.