Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O'Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., "V with n," illustrated by…

Weak forms belong to the realm of sentence phonetics. Syntactic and phonetic conditions for the various appearances of weak forms are discussed. Two examples show how much of a role weak forms have played in FL teaching. Comparisons with English are made. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association of America, December 29, 1968, in New York, New York. (DS)

The third volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains three articles. They are: "Recent Approaches to Grammar and Their Significance for Contrastive Structure Studies," by Rolf Berndt; "Some Remarks on the Factive and Non-Factive Complements in English and Serbo-Croatian," by Ljiljana Bibovic; and "On Conjoined…

Lexical differences between English and German in "there" constructions are examined. Contrastive evidence is also examined to propose analyses for certain troublesome types of "there" constructions in English. The descriptive approach attempts to show that the structuring of information in "there" sentences is dependent on lexical features of the…

This article discusses the difference between French and English constructions of motion and change of place, by contrasting French and English examples of such constructions. (CLK)

Second part of the series will appear in the next issue. (.dS)

The seventh volume of this series contains five articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "The English Gerund as a Subject and its Serbo-Croatian Structural Equivalents," by Ljiljana Bibovic; "Relators," by Vladimir Ivir, D. McMillan and T. Merz; "The Source of Relative Clauses," by Ljiljana…

An investigation of two sentence types in English and Spanish contrasts the syntactic features of each and examines the implications for second language instruction. Existential-presentative (ex-pr) and non-existential-presentative (pr) sentences are seen as an important tool for communication because they introduce an element that is…

The grammatical phenomenon in Japanese known as Ga-No conversion is examined. In this phenomenon, the nominative particle "ga" can be converted to genitive particle "no" in embedded sentences with a nominal head such as a relative clause or complementary clause. A pragmatic constraint to this conversion that has not previously been explored is…

Two competing hypotheses about speech processing were examined in two experiments. The hypotheses were that: (1) people rely on the configurational properties of sentences in relative clause (RC) processing; and (2) people rely on the grammatical roles of the noun phrases involved in relativization in RC processing. The first experiment used a…

The first part of the sixth volume in this series consists of a 116-item annotated bibliography of American doctoral dissertations in contrastive linguistics. The second part consists of six articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "A Contrastive Analysis Evaluation of Conversion in…