Grammatical gender embedded in determiners, nouns and adjectives allows indirect and more rapid processing of the referents implied in sentences. However in a language such as Spanish, this useful information cannot be reliably retrieved from a single source of information. Instead, noun gender may be extracted either from phono-morphological,…

The interpretation of floating quantifiers in Japanese requires knowledge of hierarchical phrase structure. However, the input to children is insufficient or even misleading, as our analysis indicates. This presents an intriguing question on learnability: do children interpret floating quantifiers based on a structure-dependent rule which is not…

Recent research on moment-to-moment language comprehension has revealed striking differences between adults and preschool children. Adults rapidly use the "referential principle" to resolve syntactic ambiguity, assuming that modification is more likely when there are 2 possible referents for a definite noun phrase. Young children do not.…

The study of definite descriptions has been a central part of research in linguistics and philosophy of language since Russell's seminal work "On Denoting" (Russell 1905). In that work Russell quickly dispatches analyses of denoting expressions with forms like "no man," "some man," "a man," and "every…

In this dissertation I provide a principled, unified account of modality and causation in Serbian dative anticausatives using a typological, cognitive approach. This analysis is set within a larger claim that the causative and modal meanings crosslinguistically arise in the same morphosyntactic environments, indicating a shared conceptual base…

There is a distinct attempt on the part of the state to reposition the textbook as a key teaching and learning resource in South African schools. While the textbook industry has responded to the growing demand for better quality textbooks and attempted to embrace the tenets of the country's Constitution, especially as it relates to the issue of…

The development of corpus linguistics has laid theoretical foundation and provided technical support for breaking the bottleneck in traditional vocabulary instruction in China. Corpora allow access to authentic data and show frequency patterns of words and grammar construction. Such patterns can be used to improve language materials or to directly…

This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

Using corpora in language teaching has revolutionized language research with its "authentic" appeal. Corpus tools have enabled linguistic researchers and teachers to investigate actual usages and the characteristics of certain genres in order to improve syllabus design and infer more effective classroom exercises. From this perspective,…

Early bilingualism is thought to facilitate language learning [Klein, E. C. (1995). "Second versus third language acquisition: Is there a difference?" "Language Learning", 45(3), 419-466; Cromdal, J. (1999). "Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish-English bilinguals."…

The way in which an event is packaged linguistically can be informative about the number of participants in the event and the nature of their participation. At times, however, a sentence is ambiguous, and pragmatic information weighs in to favor one interpretation over another. Whereas adults may readily know how to pick up on such cues to…

The purpose of this paper is to compare the efficiency of the core schema-based instruction (SBI) in learning English prepositions between two groups that were placed depending on learners' level of English proficiency. The SBI in the present study refers to a way of teaching in which the schematic core meaning of a given lexical item is provided.…

Given that L1A of subject properties in non-null subject languages emerges later than that of null subject languages, this study aims at determining to what extent the same pattern of acquisition is observed in early child L2A in bilingual immersion settings where English and Spanish are both source and target languages. Using an elicited oral…

Purpose: The present article reports on the implementation and results of a randomized intervention trial targeting the literate language skills of prekindergarten children without identified language disorders but with low oral language skills. Method: Children (N = 82; 45 boys and 37 girls) were screened-in and randomized to a business-as-usual…

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS…