Responds to comments by various researchers on an early article presented in the same issue of this journal, claiming that language separation and crosslinguistic influence coexist in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

A discussion of techniques for assisting native English-speaking students in understanding the concept of gender in such languages as French, German, Italian, and Spanish considers three issues: (1) What is gender? (2) What is a good way to learn the gender of nouns? and (3) How did the concept of gender develop and how can the concept help one to…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the relation between knowledge of formatives and knowledge of formative derivatives and the relation between knowledge of nonformatives and knowledge of nonformative derivatives, and to determine if the first relation is greater than the second. The subjects were 178 college freshmen who were enrolled…

The second volume of an annual series following the arrangement of the "MLA International Bibliography" includes sections on European, Asian, African, and Latin American literatures. The classified collection of 1,744 brief abstracts of journal articles on the modern languages and literatures to be used in conjunction with the annual…

Reviews the history of machine translation (MT) research in China. Describes Chinese MT techniques as based on syntactic analysis, full use of fixed phrases, the key role of funtion words, and emphasis on formal analysis without neglecting meaning. (Available from ALLC, Dr. Rex Last, German Dept., Univ. of Hull, Hull HU57RX, England.) (Author/MES)

Comments on the Reports of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, advocating more involvement in the political processes, and promotion of international studies by language departments. Describes efforts in this direction under way at the University of Arizona, including an undergraduate program called Literature…

Reexamines the work of earlier scholars on the circumstances accompanying the changes in the names of the days of the week. Syntactic changes as well as the Church's struggle to eradicate the names of the pagan divinities played a great role in effecting these changes. Dual designations, full forms, and condensed ones existed side by side in some…

The 1983 Catalonian Linguistic Normalization Law made Spanish and Catalan co-official languages in that region. The law's constitutionality was challenged and after more than a decade of litigation was upheld by Spain's Supreme Court, producing a polemic in Catalonia and, tangentially, an impact in the Basque region and Galicia. (21 references)…

The first half of this pamphlet stresses the value of foreign language learning in general from historical and cultural points of view. The second half indicates the growing importance of Spanish in the economic and cultural spheres as an inducement to student selection of Spanish as a second language. (JH)

This paper examines the semantic structure of antonyms on the basis of some examples taken from Romanian. Both grammatical and lexical antonyms are considered with a view toward grasping the correspondence and differences between the two classes. Representative examples illustrate the following conclusions: (1) the distinction between lexical and…

Outlines a lesson in a college Spanish class in which the students were shown the close relationship between Spanish and Portuguese. This kind of class not only makes the students more conscious of the relatedness of languages but also can stimulate their interest in studying another language. (CFM)

The "Transylvanian School," a group mainly composed of clergy of the Transylvanian Uniate Church, was chiefly responsible for originating and fostering the myth of the Roman origins of the Romanian people, elaborating it in works of history, in schoolbooks, and in grammars and dictionaries. The major figure of the group, Gheorge Sincai,…

A discussion of the need to promote mutual comprehension among speakers of Romance languages describes one university program in France and looks at the possibility of extending multilanguage instruction to secondary education. The potential, and problems, of trying to teach students listening comprehension in several related languages are…

Examines the Modern Language Association database containing information on several institutional characteristics and foreign-language registrations in individual colleges and universities in selected years (1970, 1974, 1980, 1986, and 1990). The database permits assessment of changes through time in registration levels and the percentage of…

In the bilingual contexts of two regions of Spain, Asturias (Asturian/Spanish) and Eastern Aragon (Catalan/Spanish), and given the relationship between language attitudes and linguistic proficiency, our study has two objectives. Firstly, the attitudes to the two contact languages are described. Secondly, the variables that can explain such…