This article measures the productivity index of the Old English suffixes -cund, -ful, and -isc as well as the prefix ful- and checks the results against the diachronic evolution of the affixes. The frameworks brought to the discussion include Type frequency measurement, as well as productivity indexes proposed by Baayen (1992, 1993, 2009) and Trips (2009). The sources are both textual (The Dictionary of Old English Corpus) and lexicographical (the lexical database of Old English Nerthus). The conclusion drawn is that Baayen's (1992, 1993, 2002) index of Global Productivity provides the most consistent results with the diachronic evolution of the affixes.

Theoretical accounts of Greek compounds argue for a close relation between their stress properties and their underlying structure. Compounds that preserve and receive stress at the same position as their second constituent are analyzed as stem-word constructions, while those that receive antepenultimate stress are viewed as belonging to the stem-stem category. Using an auditory lexical decision task, we examine the effect of stress change on the processing of compounds in the light of existing theoretical linguistic accounts. Although our experimental results do not reach statistical significance, we believe that they are informative of the cognitive status and role of stress in compound processing. Finally, they relate to existing theories of compounding in Greek and reflect the complex interaction of the psycholinguistic effects of stress and the structural properties of these constructions.

This article investigates the postverbal negation construction in Taiwanese Southern Min. I propose that the construction is derived in a way similar to resultatives and that the postverbal negation bo and its affirmative counterpart u are particular kinds of aspectual elements in the resultative complement. Given this, the lack of (apparent) postverbal negation in the closely-related language Mandarin Chinese can be ascribed to the fact that Mandarin Chinese lacks this particular aspectual use of affirmative you and negative mei(you) and thus it fails to generate the structure under investigation. It is also shown that the proposed analysis is supported by cross-linguistic correlations among Chinese languages.

This contribution explores a methodological problem in language acquisition studies. Much research in language acquisition has shown that children use statistical learning as a strategy in the acquisition of their native language (Saffran et al. 1996 and many others). Frequency of occurrence is also believed to determine the order of acquisition of phonological structures in the construction of the grammar (Boersma and Levelt 2000, Levelt et al. 2000, van de Weijer and Sloos 2013). How do we obtain the relevant frequency information for acquisition studies?

Ideally, we should take into account children's speech or child-directed speech (CDS), depending on the purposes of the investigation. Investigations into the construction of the lexicon and acquisition of the grammar depend on the input, the perception, and the lexical storage of the child, and therefore, frequency data on CDS seem most desirable.