Demonstrates the regularity of the structure of the present indicative in modern French. (AM)

The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inalienable possession (IP) in Romance languages hinges more on inferences than is commonly assumed. Most of the analysis concerns Spanish because that language provides the best evidence of how IP is non-grammatical in the sense that it is free of morpho-syntactic constraints. French and…

Discusses problems encountered in the use of possessives in spoken Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Throughout the centuries in Spain, the Castilians and Catalans have shared cultural, social, political, generational, and human experiences. This exchange was bound to have a linguistic influence of the Castilian on the Catalan language. (In Catalonia bilingualism is prevalent, and in Castile it is not.) While there have been lexical changes, the…

A discussion of language acquisition assumes that lexicon plays a central role, and that the principles of conventionality and contrast are also essential. It examines the hypotheses children draw on about possible word meanings and how they map their meanings into forms. This process begins with children's emerging knowledge of conventional words…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…