This paper reports three experiments that test the Presupposition-Denial account of complement set reference. According to the theory, complement set focus arises when focus is on the difference between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a large presupposed amount. We call this difference the shortfall. In this paper, what is…

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed…

Data from child language comprehension show that children make errors in interpreting pronouns as late as age 6;6 yet correctly comprehend reflexives from the age of 3;0. On the other hand, data from child language production show that children correctly produce both pronouns and reflexives from the age of 2 or 3. Current explanations of this…

Four recent volumes on acquisition of French by different populations cover a range of areas, particularly the development of verbal tense/agreement and nominal gender/concord in first language (L1) acquirers, as opposed to second language (L2) learners; the generalizability of grammatical deficits (e.g. difficulty acquiring parametrized features…

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and have reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language. The two groups of speakers were presented with complex sentences consisting of a main…

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First,…

This paper examines an under-studied component of deep vocabulary knowledge, affective meaning, which is used to convey attitudes. Two affective dimensions, evaluation and potency, are examined to determine whether they influence the vocabulary choices of native speakers of American-English in describing interpersonal interactions. In Experiment…

This article addresses the debate on the causes of variability in production of second language functional morphology. It reports a study on article production by first language (L1) Serbian/second language (L2) English learners and compares their behaviour to that of a Turkish learner of English, reported in Goad and White (2004). In particular,…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…

An analysis of noun classes in Tikar, a Benue-Congo language spoken in west central Cameroon, looks at patterns in the noun class system, concord system (possessives, demonstratives, demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative pronouns, third-person pronouns, relative pronouns, copula, adjectivals, and numerals) with an eye to determining whether…

Facts on the grammar of Kazakh, spoken in Kazakhstan, are presented. They are intended as a guide, not an instructional text. Information is presented in the form of notes and word lists on the following topics: orthography (the Cyrillic alphabet, spelling reform, stylistic and dialectal alternations, common misspellings, and homographs);…

An approach to teaching the paradigmatic and reciprocal uses of the "se" construction in Spanish is presented. A system of eight basic categories of the paradigmatic reflexives is outlined, including "do-it-yourself," reciprocal, reflexive of change, consumer, reflexive of interest, optional, change of meaning, and reflexive-only classifications.…

The implications of the properties of certain recursive rules are explored. It is concluded that (a) no completely coherent system of rules could allow perniciously recursive rules, and (b) certain constructions of English can only be described using perniciously recursive rules. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

Three aspects of existential sentences in English and Polish are discussed, and on the basis of the considerations of the logical and structural characteristics of existential sentences, some conclusions are drawn concerning the deep structure and derivation of these sentences. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)