In making decisions regarding the focus for grammar teaching, ESL instructors may take into consideration errors that appear to result from the influence of their students' first language(s) (L1). There is also evidence from language acquisition research suggesting that for some grammatical features, learners of different L1 backgrounds may face…

The location of an object is often described by spatially relating it to a known landmark. The spatial terms used in such descriptions can provide various types of information. For example, projective terms such as "above" indicate direction but not distance, whereas proximal terms such as "near" indicate distance but not direction. Previous…

A cross-modal priming experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that lexical access of verbs marked with a specific inflectional suffix would be facilitated by immediately prior exposure to semantically and contextually unrelated verbs with the same suffix. It was hypothesized that while listening to spoken "-ed" sentences,…

The second-year grammar of Inupiaq, an Eskimo language spoken in northwestern Alaska, contains six chapters on these grammatical constructions: contemporative I mood; operative-imperative and negative contemporative moods; demonstrative adverbs in locative, vialis, ablative, and terminalis; transitive "present" and "past" tense…

The few remaining fluent speakers of the isleno dialect of Spanish vary their casual pronunciation of /s/ in a manner consistent with, but not identical to, other Caribbean Spanish dialects. The behavior of /s/ in the speech of nonfluent islenos parallels that of fluent speakers, differing only in the higher degree of aspiration and deletion. This…

Two types of causative constructions in Korean behave differently both syntactically and semantically. This paper presents the syntactic differences between syntactic causative constructions and morphological causative constructions in terms of merger process of argument structures, and in the Case assignment in the two constructions in terms of…

A sentence such as "I am going to find the store" may be reduced to "I[ma]find the store." This reduction consists of a reduction of the auxiliary, changing "I am" to "I'm," and an adjunction of infinitival "to" onto "going" to derive "gonna." From there, "gonna" is…

In a study of English auxiliary verb usage, it is proposed that this category of verbs share a characteristic that explains some idiosyncracies: they do not show morphosyntactic inflectional irregularities. According to this account, the relationship between auxiliaries and full verbs is distant, and the morphosyntactic categories that auxiliaries…

This study examined prior qualitative differences in the process of the emergence of verb use in two sisters when they were each 12 to 24 months of age (the older sister is 2 years and 9 months older than the younger sister). Daily diaries on both children were kept by the mother, who noted emergent structure and vocabulary. Systematic Analysis of…

In an anniversary tribute to Paul Diderichsen, this report suggests that the theories and analyses put forth by Diderichsen in 1935 are central to both the general and empirical research on the Germanic languages. Particular emphasis is placed on the proposal to analyze the "verb-second-analysis" phenomenon in Germanic languages.…

A model of the child's learning of the past tense forms of English verbs is discussed. This connectionist model takes as input a present-tense verb and provides as output a past tense form. A new simulation is applied to 13 problems raised by critics of the model, presented as fundamental flaws in the conceptualizations underlying connectionism.…

A study is made of the derivation of English verbs from instrumental prepositional phrases, and their morphology and semantic categories are discussed. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)

This article discusses the semantics of the notion of focus, insofar as it relates to Filipino languages. The evolution of this notion is reviewed, and an alternative explanation of it is given, stressing the fact that grammar and semantics should be kept separate in a discussion of focus. (CLK)

This study examines the role of verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in the recognition and recall of sentences. The results indicate that concrete noun phrases are more easily remembered while verb imagery had no effect. (DE)

Finds that while strong verbs and reporting of "body language" make news stories exciting, they also make the stories less credible. (RB)