Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

There are two facets to the lyric rhythm of Taiwanese folk songs: beat alignment and metrical pattern selection. Because the lyrics are metrically derived from classical Chinese verse, a prosodic line may have syllable-beat symmetry. However, syllable-beat mismatches are also common. Lexical syllables have preference over functor syllables in beat…

Investigates why graduates of Arabic courses in English-speaking countries are so few in number and why they so often compare poorly in spoken language performance with graduates of other language courses. The most important factor in this phenomenom is the gap that separates written Arabic from spoken Arabic. (SED)

Novice poetry readers need to realize that there are limits to poetic license, specifically with regard to the order of words in a sentence of poetry. For example, the integrity of independent clauses is not violated--no word placed in one independent clause is meant to be read as an element of another independent clause. Although parenthetical…

Educational programs for teachers of English as a Second Language must devote more attention to differences between the standard varieties of American and British English, with instruction focusing on the major orthographic, morphological, syntactic, collocational, and lexical differences. (CB)