This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Recent research has shown that beat gestures (hand gestures that co-occur with speech in spontaneous discourse) are temporally integrated with prosodic prominence and that they help word memorization and discourse comprehension. However, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of beat gestures in second language (L2) pronunciation…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N = 50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

This case study investigates the bilingual and trilingual codeswitching patterns of two multilinguals who grew up in a Hungarian-Romanian two-language family in Transylvania, and whose bilingual codeswitching changed into trilingual codeswitching after they moved to North America. An analysis of the speakers' discourse reveals the amounts of…

The growing presence of children of immigrant families in the public school system in the bilingual region of Catalonia provides us with an opportunity to study how young multilingual and multicultural speakers construct their social competencies and their identity within the specific context of a gate-keeping social institution such as the…

The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inalienable possession (IP) in Romance languages hinges more on inferences than is commonly assumed. Most of the analysis concerns Spanish because that language provides the best evidence of how IP is non-grammatical in the sense that it is free of morpho-syntactic constraints. French and…

The study discusses the position of the protolanguage in the hierarchy formed by idiolect, dialect, and diasystem. The article emphasizes that linguistic study contains a great many diachronic events and hypothesized synchronic features that are implausible, yet possible. (30 references) (CK)

Provides a new perspective on whether there is a correlation between finiteness and verb placement in second language acquisition by analyzing data from speakers of Romance languages learning German as a second language. Verbs are classified as thematic and nonthematic and analyzed with respect to overt subject-verb agreement and verb placement as…

Reexamines the work of earlier scholars on the circumstances accompanying the changes in the names of the days of the week. Syntactic changes as well as the Church's struggle to eradicate the names of the pagan divinities played a great role in effecting these changes. Dual designations, full forms, and condensed ones existed side by side in some…

The first volume of this series is divided into reports, studies, and preliminary results of work in progress. All were presented at a meeting on contrastive linguistics held in Romania. The project is intended to reveal the specificity of the structures and systems of Romanian and English with a view to comparing them and, on that basis,…

The sixth volume of this series contains eight contrastive studies in the syntax and semantics of English and Romanian. They are: "Criteria for the Contrastive Analysis of English Nouns," by Andrei Bantas; "Adjectives as Noun Modifiers in Post-Verbal Position," by Ioana Poenaru; "Towards a Semantic Description of 'Tense'…