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The paper discusses hedges such as that I know of in The train is not late, that I know of, which form a hitherto undocumented polarity sensitive construction that can be found in a number of European languages. Internally, they resist negation, in ways reminiscent of parenthetical as-clauses, and other parenthetical constructions. On the basis of a small corpus of English and Dutch occurrences of the hedge construction, I outline the distributional properties and internal structure. A number of restrictions are uncovered regarding the subject of the hedge clause (in particular: universally quantified and indefinite subjects are ruled out, second person subjects are limited to questions), which point to a strong pragmatic effect of point of view, but still require further study. The polarity sensitive status of the hedge is derived from the interaction of strong verbs (know, be aware of, etc.) and the pragmatic requirement of hedges that they tone down a statement. Together, these require that the hedge be within the scope of negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]