One way to make it possible for students to write intelligible composition in a foreign language is to provide them with a knowledge and understanding of the bilingual dictionary at the beginning of the composition course. A unit on dictionary usage is presented that was designed for use with students in a third-year college Spanish composition…

The effect of Finnish language experiences on the way native speakers of English evaluate errors made by Finns in producing English was examined. The study was designed to show the role of the criterion of acceptability in the evaluation process and to establish some of the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors that may affect the…

A study of data on Japanese children shows that the development of verbs occurs at the same time as the development of nouns and may even precede it. The subjects for the study were two children who were learning Japanese as their first language. Four speech samples, taken between the ages of 22 and 28 months, were audiotaped and supplemented by…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

The properties of "do", its distribution and meaning, are discussed. "Do" is one of the most common error-zones for Indian learners of English. Two analyses of "do" which account for the distribution and meaning of this element are presented. According to the transformational approach, "do" is introduced in…

In a sentence containing a conjunction "when,""once," or "as soon as," the events in the main and the subordinate clauses are understood as occurring closely together in time. This paper endeavors to uncover the subtle differences which nevertheless exist among them. Clauses headed by "when" can refer to a…

Both spoken and written Polish have undergone profound changes during the past twenty-eight years. The increasing urbanization of Polish culture and the forced change in Polish society are the main factors influencing the change in the language. Indirect evidence of changes which have occurred in the vocabulary and idioms of spoken Polish in the…

A situation of linguistic contact often produces various degrees of change in at least one of the languages involved. It is shown that the syntactic, as well as the phonological and the lexical, components are the locus of interference from one language on the other. Features of interference are described as part of a systematic pattern build on a…

This study is divided into two sections: the first examines Standard French indirect interrogation, noting several distinct verb classes which are discussed in terms of permutations of WH-words, reduction, multiple WH-words, cleavage, semantic compatibility, and the "que-" completive; the second part focuses on indirect interrogation and…

This reference grammar of Japanese is divided into thirty-one major sections: (1) notational conventions, including spelling, punctuation, accent, and juncture; (2) sentence construction: nuclear sentences and expanded sentences; (3) predicate adjuncts; (4) expansion constraints and noun subcategorization; (5) voice conversions; (6) nuclear focus…

The language of a small group of 4-year-old Chicano children in a predominantly Chicano nursery school setting (Chicano 85%, Black 13%, Anglo 2%) is the focus of this study, which investigates the phonology of communication, the grammar and syntax of conversations, and the sociocognitive influence on English language usage as expressed by…

This paper discusses the results of part of an ongoing project studying an aspect of real world language usage, the comprehension of standard jury instructions. Problems in the comprehension of these instructions include the memory load that they impose, the fact that most instructions are read only once, and the fact that instructions are written…

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Supports claim that linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts based on study of English may prove unreliable as guides to sentence processing in even closely related languages such as German and Italian. Results of a test of sentence interpretation indicate that English-speaking Americans rely overwhelmingly on word order, Germans rely on both…

This paper illustrates increases in the use of English in political speeches in post-Suharto Indonesia by analyzing the phonological, morphological, and syntactic assimilation of loanwords (linguistic borrowing), as well as hybridization and code switching, and phenomena such as doubling and loan translations. The paper also examines the mixed…