Explores how the concept of "social capital" relates to the teaching of speaking and listening. Concludes that helping students identify, analyze and employ the aural, visual and verbal grammar of spoken English is not an adjunct to the subject of drama, but an intrinsic part of understanding the art form. (SG)

Presents a survey of the French indefinite "tu/vous" in in earlier periods and in a range of varieties. Draws on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy in Northern France to investigate the extent to which this use of second person pronouns helps to avoid ambiguity and co-occurs with another grammatical variable. (Author/VWL)

Reanalyzes production data from three French children to make two basic points. Shows that tense and agreement inflection follow independent courses of acquisition (in child French). Using a mechanism of grammatical development based on partial rankings of constraints, analysis successfully models over three stages the frequency with which…

Discusses a corpus-based study that focuses on word epenthesis.Provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies categorically in some environments and variably in others. Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors. Interprets such grammatical conditioning as…

Suggests that in studying English grammatical structure, English/French translation students establish a broader understanding of the language, which in turn enables them to better tackle the gymnastics of translation. Considers the value of studying the gender categorization of inanimate objects. (SG)

Looks at the value of language corpora for designing teaching materials and argues that they are an essential tool for teachers wishing to keep up to date with language as it is actually used in real life. Provides a number of useful and practical teaching examples for designing teaching tasks and for raising students' awareness to the differences…

Discusses how Natalie Babbitt combines fairy tale with psychological realism in "Tuck Everlasting" by using the motif of the hero's journey as a metaphor for a character's changing perceptions of himself or herself and the world. (MG)

One in a series of articles relating major European languages to cultural traits or artifacts finds similarities in Russian and the "isba," a country cabin found mostly in the northern part of the country. (MSE)

Examines English simple tenses in the context of pedagogical assumptions usually made about their meaning. Several meanings ascribed to the past and present tenses were essentially inaccurate. Each tense gained associated meaning from context, with a central sense of modal, rather than temporal or aspectual, meaning. (Author/CB)

An investigation looks at complex English sentences that are used to represent two ordered events and containing "before" or "after" subordinate clauses. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing. (25 references) (Author/VWL)

This study examined the referential properties of a class of complex pronouns labelled M-Pronouns, exemplified by Old English "himself," French "lui-meme," and English "his own." It is shown that M-Pronouns exhibit some properties commonly taken as characterizing reflexive anaphors, and that they also occur as…

Recent proposals to make Knowledge about Language (KAL) an integral part of the teaching of English in Britain and Northern Ireland are discussed. The KAL debate is traced from the 1975 Bullock Report, which ended the teaching of traditional grammar, through the lack of progress to the present day. (Contains 19 references.) (Author/LB)

Examines Noam Chomsky's (1957) discussion of "grammaticalness" and the role of linguistics in the "correct" way of speaking and writing. It is argued that the concern of linguistics with the tools of grammar has resulted in confusion, with the tools becoming mixed up with the actual language, thereby becoming the central…

Discusses a 1993 study by Frazier, d'Arcais, and Coolen intended to test Schreuder's (1990) Morphological Integration model concerning the processing of separable and inseparable verbs. Suggests that the logic of the experiment is flawed and that the data do not warrant the author's conclusions. (DR)

Discusses a 1993 study by Frazier, d'Arcais, and Coolen intended to test Schreuder's (1990) Morphological Integration model concerning the processing of separable and inseparable verbs, and attempts to refute Kempen's objections to their interpretation of the experimental results in this issue. (DR)