This paper investigates nominal recursive modification (RM) in the L1 acquisition of French. Although recursion is considered the fundamental property of human languages, recursive self-embedding is found to be difficult for children in a variety of languages and constructions. Despite these challenges, the acquisition of RM proves to be resilient; acquirable even under severely degraded input conditions. From a minimalist perspective on the operations of narrow syntax, recursive embedding is essentially the application of a sequence of Merge operations (Chomsky 1995; Trotzke and Zwart 2014); therefore, given the universality of Merge, we do not expect to find cross-linguistic differences in how difficult recursion is. But if the challenging nature of recursion stems from factors which might differ from language to language, we expect different outcomes cross-linguistically. We compare new data from French to existing English data (Pérez-Leroux et al. 2012) in order to examine to what extent language-specific properties of RM structures determine the acquisition path. While children's production differs significantly from their adult's counterparts, we find no differences between French-speaking and English-speaking children. Our findings suggest that the challenging nature of recursion does not stem from the grammar itself and that what shapes the acquisition path is the interaction between universal properties of language and considerations not specific to language, namely computational efficiency.

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The technique of reconstructing the thematic pairs of weather omens does not reveal the patterns for their formation. This strategy of analysis does not provide an answer to the question of how a particular event situation is related to a specific weather forecast. The deep semiotic structures of the upcoming weather omens will not fundamentally differ from the semiotic structures of other omens, because their patterns are formed from the actualized semantic features of binary oppositions, in which the event and predictive parts of omens will be implemented. The article analyzes the signs, in the event part of which the meteorological and other natural phenomena are described, the "behavior" of the material objects, the behavior of animals, birds and other faunal forms, body sensations, their structural and semiotic patterns are determined and their belonging to semantic-functional classes are identified.

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