This paper discusses some of the problems that arise for students and instructors in the teaching of the linguistics of a language to students in the process of learning that language as a second language (L2). Because non-native speakers may not have reached terminal competence in the L2, the language being presented in linguistics classes as…

This issue of working papers focuses on the relationship between the mind and language. Papers include the following: (1) "The Role of Language of Thought in Foreign Language Learning" (Andrew D. Cohen); (2) "UG Accessibility in Second Language Acquisition: Re-examining the Binding Parameter" (Howard Chen); (3) "Helping Philippe: Constructions of…

A study of codeswitching patterns in American speakers of Finnish, primarily at the syntactic level, is presented. Subjects are 21 Finnish-English bilinguals aged 8 to 91 years, whose speech in naturally occurring speech situations was recorded and analyzed for intrasentential codeswitching. The analysis looked at (1) how much codeswitching could…

A discussion of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching focuses on the relationship of lexical items to the syntactic situations in which they may occur, and the importance of teaching this relationship to language learners. First, common errors made by ESL students that are attributable to lack of syntactic context knowledge are identified.…

An assessment battery, measuring multiple aspects of language, was administered to 29 children between 4 and 5 years of age who had been born prematurely. The children, who weighed less than 2,500 grams at birth after less than 37 weeks of gestation, were recruited from a cohort of children originally admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit…

The nine papers in this collection include: "L'expression du feminin dans l'adjectif latin: Genese et extension de *-ih2 comme morpheme de feminin grammatical en indo-europeen" (The Expression of the Feminine in the Latin Adjective: Genesis and Extension of the -ih2' as Grammatical Feminine Morpheme in Indo-European); "Lexikalische…

A small-scale study at a British university investigated two issues: the effect of task familiarity on language production; and the effects of the task on oral production. Three university students of differing language backgrounds, all non-native speakers of English, were interviewed in autumn and again 3 months later. On both occasions they were…

The Australian aboriginal language Kuuku Ya'u and its closely related dialect Umpila are described. An introductory chapter provides information on the classification of the languages, linguistic type, and dialect groups. The second chapter outlines aspects of the phonology of Kuuku Y'au and Umpila, including phonemes, vowel length, consonant…

The unique position of WH words in Slavic languages is discussed, with specific reference to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The multiple fronting characteristics of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian differ in terms of the following positions and behaviors: extraction from embedded questions; clitic placement and other indications of constituent status;…

A concise typology of Koine Greek relative clauses is presented, drawing on data from the Greek New Testament. The analysis begins by pointing out that Koine uses the strategy of relative pronouns in all relative clauses. The other ways in which relative pronouns are used, in addition to introducing the relative clause, are then described. The…

A study examined the patterns of error in the preterite and imperfect tenses in the written Spanish of native English-speaking college students. Errors found in the midterm examination were analyzed to determine whether they were due to incorrect tense, incorrect form of the tense, or both. It was predicted that many students would choose…

The morphological and lexical bases of Dravidian complementation are explored by proposing a series of rules that govern the distribution of finite predicates in the Dravidian sentence. The distribution of two verbs, "a-" ("become") and "en-" ("say"), is shown to be correlated with the distribution of finite predicates. These predicates are…

Students in intermediate language courses, especially conversational courses, can benefit from a simple set of instructions for combining words and phrases into sentences. A description of the basic concepts determining word order in German--the fundamental sequence of clause elements, the "infrastructure," and the movement rules by which the…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

Reading and writing are both creative acts of communication that use written language as a vehicle for meaning. A strong theoretical case for teaching the two processes concurrently can be built by examining points of contact between reading and writing. One such point is context concerns. The Communication Triangle model (author/audience/…