This study examined how English learners in second-language (SL) and foreign-language (FL) contexts employ tense backshifting in indirect reported speech. Participants included 35 international students in the United States, 37 Bulgarian speakers of English, 38 Bosnian speakers of English, and 41 native English speakers. The instrument involved…

Discusses key points raised in the articles in this special issue of the journal. Suggests progress is being made in using complementary theories of the role of lexical representation, prediction, and crosslinguistic variation to get a full picture of this complex area of lexico-morhposyntactic knowledge. (Author/VWL)

Presents the results of a cross-linguistic study of the role of scope phenomena in untutored second language acquisition, or how adult learners in different source and target language settings acquire the means to express which part of an utterance is semantically affected by scope-bearing elements such scope particles or negation. (Author/VWL)

Acquisition of negation in Italian as a second language (L2) is investigated on the basis of the longitudinal data of five learners with different first languages in the framework of a functional approach focusing on the semantic and pragmatic principles governing the organization of learner varieties and the process of their complexification.…

Analyzes the results of a 1975 study of a 12-year-old Spanish speaker with regard to his acquisition of negation in English. The hypothesis of formulating/testing second language learning is reaffirmed with an alternate explanation of variation in syntactic forms. Results show that free variation is functionally determined. (LMO)