Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

How languages are acquired and what stages learners go through has been the focus in language teaching area, and this cross-sectional study investigated the use of English adverbs by elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate level Turkish EFL students at Anadolu University School of Foreign Languages by analyzing it from acquisitional…

The validity of 2 implicational universals regarding constituent order in questions is tested in the English speech of 14 native speakers of Japanese, Turkish, and Korean. The interlanguage evidence is found to be generally supportive of the 2 universals. (31 references). (Author/VWL)

Deals with the issue of sentence processing in a second language (L2) showing how L2 learners resolve the problem of competing factors of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the processing of L2 utterances. The results of a study involving sentence interpretation by L2 learners of English are presented. (Author/SED)

Analysis of the responses of Spanish, Chinese, and German learners of English-as-a-Second-Language to English sentences with empty pronominal categories found that, although empty pronouns were pragmatically more natural in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese than in English or German, only the Spanish subjects had significantly higher mean…

Investigates the contribution of markedness and learning principles to second language (L2)acquisition. Korean language learners of English completed a written sentence-combining task and a written grammaticality judgment task. Results show subjects acquire English relative clauses in the same order and suggests that L2 learners have dual access…

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of interrogative-word questions in English. It is shown that the data from some bilingual English speakers at Pan American University are comparable to the data noted by others for both second and first language acquisition of interrogative word questions. In particular, interrogative-word…

The use of case frames of verbs as a control for the teaching of vocabulary items has a number of distinct advantages over other controls. The case frame associated with a particular vocabulary item, or with a particular semantic class, would be the same in the native and the target language (English). This would have the advantage of allowing the…