Aboriginal English, the language many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students bring to the classroom, represents the introduction of significant change into the English language. It is the argument of this paper that the linguistic, social and cultural facts associated with the distinctiveness of Aboriginal English need to be taken into…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

Jurgen Meisel argues that "grammatical variation...can be described...in terms of parametric variation", and--crucially for his arguments in this paper--that "parameter settings do not change across the lifespan". To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls "the literature on historical…

From the point of view on postcolonial theories, this paper explores English language's influence on normal Chinese and Hong Kong Chinese, and concludes the advantage and disadvantage of this phenomenon.

This study hypothesizes that negation and finiteness are linked in the development of foreign language acquisition in comparable ways to their development in first language acquisition. By contrasting synchronic intrapersonal variability data with change occurring in the diachronic data about negation, this article shows how adult learners of…

Grammaticalization is often regarded in the literature as a distinct process requiring explanatory machinery unique to its own domain. Argues, on the contrary, that grammaticalization is simply a cover term for certain syntactic, semantic, and phonetic changes, all of which apply independently of each other. (Author/VWL)

Paper presented at sessions of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Atlanta, Georgia, November 24, 1972. (VM)

Discusses points made in a previous paper, arguing that the presence of the basic word order Agent-Verb-Patient in the Basic Variety (BV) may reflect the salience of this word order in the target language as suggested by comparable data from creoles. Although the BV may serve the communicative functions of true languages, they may not fulfill…

In spoken German "weil" frequently occurs with verb-second (v2) word order instead of prescribed ver-last (vlast). This article provides an overview of the variation and its historical development and offers suggestions and materials for a linguistic unit in the advanced language classroom. Current research demonstrates that the variation is not…

This book has been conceived as a companion to learnability for the benefit of those linguists who base their work on Chomsky's "Principles and Parameters Hypothesis." General concepts from formal theory and complexity theory and important facts from psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and language processing have been introduced…

Examines the transplantation of dialects of Italian abroad, particularly to Canada. Argues that any discussion of the language of immigrants from Italy has to start from the premise that they brought their dialect, not Italian, to their new home. Conclusions indicate that "Italo-Canadian" shares many linguistic characteristics with…

Volume 3 of the Russian Dialect Studies is a bibliography listing Russian dialect studies published in the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia and abroad. The selection has been oriented primarily toward phonological and morphological studies of the dialects, and secondarily toward lexical, syntactic, and other studies. The bibliography is also…

A study investigated the extent to which English compound nouns are problematic for learners of English as a second language and identifies some causes of this comprehension difficulty. Subjects were 34 university students, of widely varying language backgrounds, in courses in English for academic purposes. Each was administered an instrument…

This quarterly publication is designed to share information of practical, theoretical, administrative, and general interest. It provides linguistic fieldworkers with news, reviews, announcements, and articles that will stimulate interest in linguistics and help them to stay current with the field. Articles in this volume include the following: "Is…

In teaching a course on the history of the German language, it is preferable to use the linguistic approach, which deals with the structure of language and those linguistic events which characterize the development of contemporary German from Proto-Indo-European, rather than the cultural approach, with emphasis on extralinguistic data. The main…