In Germanic and Slavic languages, the Verb is the most extensive grammatical item, which causes most of the troubles for second language learners. It has been noticed that Slavic L1 learners of English make mistakes in using verb forms due to the transfer of their L1 grammatical system (grammar concepts) onto the English language. The goal of the…

The early use of first and second person pronouns has been viewed as a sign of emerging social understanding. However, it may also depend on general language development: pronouns do not appear among the first words children acquire. In addition, some languages conjugate verbs for person, and the inflections may thus show similar relations to…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

This article investigates phenomena related to subject pronoun realization in the English interlanguage of Macedonian learners. Preliminary research indicates that learners tend to omit the subject pronoun in both referential and non-referential contexts. It can be presumed that such interlanguage features are due to crosslinguistic influence,…

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of ethical datives (EDs) in two Slavic languages, Russian and Macedonian. EDs are defined through a pragmatic lens as discourse licensed perspective markers in which a dative form expresses a speaker's decision to signal someone's emotional attitude--real or perceived--toward the action. Owing to…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

Three experiments demonstrate gender congruency effects (i.e., naming times of a picture are faster when the name of the target picture and a distractor noun are gender congruent) in Czech. In the first experiment, subjects named the pictures by producing gender-marked demonstrative pronouns and a noun. In the second and third experiments,…

The enclitic status of the article in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian and Contemporary Standard Macedonian is investigated by comparing its junctural and accentual properties with those of undisputed enclitics in each language. (Author/RM)

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

An investigation is made of the use of prefixes with borrowed verbs in Serbocroatian. The data on which it is based reflect usage in speech and journalism. One conclusion is that the adaptation of borrowed verbs to the native aspectual system is almost exclusively through prefixation. (Author/RM)

A revival of interest in the Slavic participles "-nt-" and "-us-," particularly in their development into gerunds, prompts the author to question whether the forms are to be regarded as nominal or verbal forms in their linguistic classification. The historical problem of linguistic interference in the evolution of the Slavic "-nt-" and "-us-"…

Accepting the perfective aspect as the "marked" correlative of a true morphological correlation in the opposition of perfective:imperfective in Russian verb study, the author disregards non-systemic facts in order to concentrate on the aspect relations as they appear in "linear pairs". The author proceeds to describe the functions of the aspect…