This paper looks at the acquisition of articles and related nominal functional properties (the status of classifier, the singular-plural distinction) in English and French by native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese. Two experimental studies are reported. In the generative SLA literature, there is disagreement as to which properties of the grammar…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of two types of vocabulary instruction--image-schema-based instruction (ISBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI)--on the acquisition of second language (L2) polysemous words. Fifty-eight Japanese high school learners of English were divided into two treatment groups (ISBI and TBI)…

What syntactic patterns emerge in students' use of articles and modals? What are the reasons for these patterns? What implications do the findings of the study have for English language instruction in Botswana? Exactly 1556 essays comprising class assignments, written seminar presentations, test papers and examination scripts from 514 randomly…

To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck…

Pronominal referencing was evaluated in a sample of 569 children comprising four diagnostic subgroups: typical language (TL), specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (NLI), and typical language with low nonverbal IQ (LNIQ). Participants generated oral narratives in second grade and again in fourth grade. The narratives…

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes,…

This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words ("what," "who," "how" and "why"), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6-4;6. Rates of non-inversion error ("Who…

This article reports a quasi-experimental study of how error labeling in remediation exercises affects students' writing performance. Students in five sections of a course in written business communication composed the control group, whereas students in two sections composed the treatment group. On the first letter each group wrote early in the…

This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…

A study of Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria, focuses on the system of constraints governing tonal processes. Specifically, it examines the ways in which general processes of low tone raising and high tone lowering are realized in domains constructed by verbs and by preverbal auxiliary and adverbial constituents. Sequentially…

The typology of VSO (verb-subject-object) languages cannot be explained in terms of the syntactic theory (Government and Binding theory) that governs the more common SVO languages. It is considered that VSO languages might be derived from underlying SVO structure. This idea, known as the SVO Hypothesis, is presented as a paradigm to which examples…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials for students in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this basic level book are for the English subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 301 (subjects and predicates, sentence…

A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…