The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Provides an account of a distributional patterning found with certain modal verbs in a number of SVO languages of Southeast Asia, the occurrence of a particular alethic modal in predicate-final position. Describes the paradigm and how it's arguably the result of borrowing and transfer among the various languages. Its relevance for Cinque's defence…

Reports the findings of a study in which transfer of verb properties was investigated via syntactic data elicited from second language learners. The performance of Hindi-Urdu speakers on tests of English causatives was compared with that of Vietnamese speakers, because there are five significant differences between causativization patterns in…

Reports preliminary findings of an ongoing study of prosodic mixes in the speech of three trilingual siblings. The children are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish, and acquired English as the language of schooling. Prosodic mixes are defined as the intrusion of prosodic patterns of one language into another.(Author/VWL)

This study examined the ways in which adult, Korean, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners performed the "request" speech act, with particular attention to deviations caused by negative transfer. An oral discourse completion test with six request situations was given to three groups of learners; situations varied in terms of the…

Argues that children's OV utterances cannot be related transformationally to VO utterances because children initially acquire OV and VO with different sets of verbs, and also argues that L2 acquisition data can be accounted for within a model of L1 structural transfer, without requiring adult learner access to Universal Grammar. (Author/LMO)

By comparing the language performance of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and English to English second language performance across similar speech events, a study suggests a methodology for discovering potential areas of pragmatic transfer. Subjects were 6 native American English speakers and 12 native Chinese-speakers, 6 using Chinese and 6…

A study compared the topical structure (TS) of Arabic and English in order to determine whether Arab learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) transfer potential differences between Arabic and English in their English writing, or whether they use an altogether different TS indicative of developmental factors. Four sets of data were compared…

A study examined pragmatic variation across Turkish and American English in the speech act of chastisement, to determine occurrence of pragmatic transfer in the interlanguage of native Turkish speakers learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Data were collected from 80 native speakers of Turkish, 14 native speakers of American English, and 68…

Forty-one papers on language research and linguistic theory from the annual conference address these topics: linguistic philosophy; aspects of phonetics and phonology; topics in syntax; aspect; topics in semantics; topics in discourse analysis; sociolinguistics and language contact; historical linguistics; metatheory; and interdisciplinary…

Essays in applied linguistics include: "Meaningful Negotiation: A Study of the Pedagogical Value of Autotutor-An Interactive Video Learning Resource" (John Stephen Byrne); "Medium of Instruction in the L2 Classroom" (Wei Danhua); "The Story of Language Contact and Shift in Ireland: How Unique, How Universal?" (Markku,…