This article presents the CercleS European Language Portfolio for university students in its translated Italian form. The illustration of the translation process takes inspiration from Rudyard Kipling's poem "I keep six honest serving men" and answers the questions What? Why? When? How? Where? and Who? in explaining how the task was…

This article explores the significance of a word and the changes it undergoes in its form when it is placed in the hierarchy of grammatical constituents thereby forming a new word termed as vocabulary. This change or transformation is the result of affixations. Transformation becomes essential as the words learnt cannot be used as such in a…

The three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are "a," "the," and "Ø" (the absence of an article). Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and…

Recent years have witnessed a lively debate on the nature of learners' morphological competence and use. Some argue that a breakdown in acquisition of second-language (L2) is expected whenever features required for the analysis of L2 input are not present in the L1. Others argue that features have the same nature and etiology in first…

This study is concerned with the acquisition of English verb transitivity by native speakers of Japanese. Both a verb's semantic class (Levin, 1993; Pinker, 1989) and its frequency (Ambridge et al., 2008) have been proposed to influence the acquisition of verbs in L1. For example, verbs whose meaning entails change-of-location or…

In this dissertation, I take a look at Middle Low German nominal phrases as evidenced in the Lubecker Ratsurteile, a collection of court proceedings published by Wilhelm Ebel in 1955, which cover the years 1421-1550. By digitizing the corpus, I was able to perform a corpus analysis on noun phrases, where I concentrated on determiner use and form,…

This dissertation addresses a number of issues about the grammar of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Inuktitut is a dialect within the Inuit dialect continuum which is a group of languages/dialects within the Eskimo-Aleut language family. (Eastern Canadian Inuktitut has an ISO 693-3 language code of "ike".) Typologically, it is an ergative…

The aims of the present study were twofold. The study addressed the issues of simultaneous attention to form and meaning in second language (L2) written input and reactivity of think-alouds. Specifically, the study examined the comprehension of L2 learners of Spanish who either attended to lexical or grammatical forms while reading for meaning or…

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models.…

This study examines aspects of the syntax-discourse interface in near-native French. Two cleft structures--"c'est" clefts and "avoir" clefts--are examined in experimental and spontaneous conversational data from 10 adult Anglophone learners of French and ten native speakers of French. "C'est" clefts mark focus, and…

In this article, I examine some of the ideas about task-based language teaching (TBLT) which have emerged over the 17 years of the current editorship of ELTJ, focusing in particular on grammar and vocabulary, and enquiring to what degree these ideas take adequate account of classroom context. Over this period, TBLT scholars have built up a…

According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is…

Following on from my state-of-the-art article on "Language Awareness and language learning" (Svalberg 2007), in this paper I will discuss specific research tasks which are centrally concerned with different aspects of language awareness (LA): "explicit knowledge about language, and conscious perception and sensitivity in language learning,…

Previous research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Goksun, Kuntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument…

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., "Lisa poured water into the cup"; "*Lisa poured the cup with water"), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., "*Bart filled water into the cup"; "Bart filled the cup with water"), and others…