Sample English reduplicative compounds on the model of flim-flam and higgledy-piggledy are analyzed for the interplay of formal features (alliteration, vowel alternation, rhyme), semantics (as parts and wholes), and obscure origins. Loans, new coinages, internal realignment, register, and affect are discussed. Inadequacies in earlier lexicographical, especially etymological, treatment are remedied.

The Polish origin of the Yakut word for ‘snuff’ was suggested some years ago but a closer look at this word nest reveals new and rather unclear aspects. The other word to be discussed here is that for ‘thousand’; its Russian origin is doubted by this author because of phonetic inaccuracies which can be well removed once a Polish etymon of the Yakut word is accepted.

The article deals with a developmental cline of the ego-et-nunc communicative scope in Slavic versus Germanic and Romance. The author posits a two pathway grammaticaliza­tion for the Indo-European ego-et-nunc communicative scope progressing along the axis of syntheticity and the axis of analyticity respectively. The prospective perspective (aspect) is typical of Slavic while the retrospective perspective is observed in the analytic Western European languages. Each of the two grammaticalization pathways is characterized by four possible changes as determined by particular configurations of the societal factors (synthetic complexification, synthetic simplification, analytic simplification, analytic complexification). The author places the systematic typology of Mel’nikov in a wider context of areal-typological and genealogical research.

This study aims to assess the extent of crosslinguistic influence in English as the weaker language of unbalanced bilingual children, and to compare the extent of such influence to that reported in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Additionally, by comparing children from different L1 backgrounds, we aim to see if typological distance impacts crosslinguistic influence. We collected elicited speech samples from 16 Polish-English and 44 French-English children who have had dual language input from birth, but whose English is weaker mostly because it is absent outside the home environment. The crosslinguistic error rates (an average of 6%) are lower for our participants than averages found in SLA literature, but still considerably high. Although French- and Polish-dominant children present comparable error profiles, the extent of crosslinguistic influence tends to be greater in the case of French-English bilinguals than for Polish-English bilinguals, which may reflect the perceived distance between the languages.