Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

This article considers a case of local language socialization and accommodation in a multilingual community of practice: the use of English as an additional academic language for specific purposes at a bilingual Swiss university and its implications for teaching. The acronym ELF(A) is used throughout as short for English as a Lingua Franca (in…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

This book is an introduction to linguistics, written for the beginning student. Among the topics explored are speculations about the origins of language, its nature, how it grows, and how it changes. Other topics include what is essential in the structure of language, the similarities and differences among languages, how the varying patterns of…

The structure, complexity, and peculiarities of the English language are examined in this book, which begins with a discussion of the nature of language. Chapters are devoted to (1) naming--"Language as Answer to a Need"; (2) grammar--"Language as Economy"; (3) words--"Language as the Finding of Minds"; (4) etymology--"Language to Stretch Brains…

This book introduces beginning students of linguistics at all levels and general readers to the study of language, providing an overview of key topics and an explanation of basic terms and ideas. The book is also designed to encourage the reader to think about the way language works and reconsider some popular misconceptions about language and…

A case study investigated the emergence of language and language concepts in a bilingual child, a girl aged 16 months to 6 years, 7 months. Observations were made by the child's parents and relatives in the child's home where the mother spoke Finnish and the father English. The report summarizes developments in phonology, morphology, word-level…

This article explains the linguistic situation in Greece and the condition of diglossia that has arisen there through the use of common Modern Greek, developing from the Athenian dialect into a medium of communication used by all Greeks, and the use of Katharevusa, the "pure" or "purifying" language which is supposedly an imitation of Ancient…

Papers from the proceedings are: "Cultural Universals in the Acquisition of Language;""The Acquisition of Locative Constructions in Cantonese Children"; "The Acquisition of VOT: Is It Language-Dependent?"; "Flexibility in Semantic Representations: Children's Ability To Switch among Different Interpretations of 'Big' and 'Little'"; "Multifunctional…

Papers from the 1998 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium include: "Patterns of Gender Agreement in the Speech of Second Language Learners"; "'Nomas' in Mexican American Dialect"; "Parsing Spanish 'solo'"; "On Levels of Processing and Levels of Comprehension"; "The Role of Attention in Second/Foreign Language Classroom Research: Methodological Issues";…

The ways that students can learn about the nature of the English language and develop a sense of excitement about their language are explored in this focused journal issue. The titles of the essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "Language, the Forgotten Content" (R. Small and P. P. Kelly); (2) "What Should English Teachers…