Deaf Learners' Acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two…

Reviews some aspects of word formation in foreign language teaching that are receiving attention in current discussions. (IFS/WGA)

The fact that impersonal verbs in Russian do not form active participles or gerunds is discussed and explained. (RM)

Explains techniques used in teaching the process of nominalization to foreign students at the Universite de Paris VIII, in reaction to common usage in the press. The techniques specifically do not use a generative grammar approach but apply principles of transformation for syntactical description. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Challenges the idea that grammatical representations in second-language development are parametric values that are transferred from the learner's native language, offering learner data incompatible with this view. Advocates a weak transfer model in which lexical and functional projections transfer, but morphology-driven values of features like the…

The second volume in this series contains three articles dealing with various aspects of Romanian-English contrastive analysis. The first articles, "The Contrastive Morphophonology of Romanian and English," by Anca Belchita-Hartular, aims at a descriptive analysis of the phonological aspect of inflection in Romanian and English, in an attempt to…

Most Russian courses suffer from an inadequate approach to the presentation of syntax even though continued emphasis on syntax from the beginning would help to remove the trial and error syndrome inherent in purely audiolingual methods and would channel the student's efforts to internalize and make automatic his answers in a relevant context, thus…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…

Contrastive analysis is viewed as an interlinguistic, bidirectional phenomenon which is concerned with both the form and function of language. As such, contrastive analysis must view language psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically as a system to be both described and acquired. Due to the need for a psychological component in the analysis,…

This is a study of the processes involved in second language learning in which the principal subject was an Iranian child who learned English in the United States without formal instruction. Some of the questions dealt with in this study include: what motivates language learning in a child; what makes the linguistic structure of a language more or…

This study, contrasting grammatical structures in English and Hungarian, considers those areas of grammar in the two languages which would cause the greatest interference for the native English speaker learning Hungarian. The choice of topics is based on the author's personal observation, both of English speakers learning Hungarian and of…

Two questions are central to the controversy in phonological theory: (1) are there empirical differences between morphophonemic alterations and allophonic variation, and (2) what are the universal constraints on the ordering of phonological processes within the phonological rule component. This paper illustrates a Natural Generative Phonology…

DESIGNED AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION FOR PROFESSIONALS PREPARING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, PLANNING COURSES, OR DEVELOPING CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAMS, A SERIES OF STUDIES HAS BEEN PREPARED THAT CONTRASTS, IN TWO VOLUMES FOR EACH OF THE FIVE MOST COMMONLY TAUGHT FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE UNITED STATES, THE SOUND AND GRAMMATICAL…