This dissertation analyzes two derived Biblical Hebrew verbal forms, the Niphal and the Hitpael. Present scholarship on Biblical Hebrew does not agree on the definition or relationship of these two stems. In chapter 1 I outline the two major problems for the Niphal and Hitpael: (1) unified definitions for each, and (2) their functional overlap. An…

In the "Handbook of Research on New Literacies," editors Julie Coiro, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, and Donald J. Leu have compiled a set of papers representing the most comprehensive discussion to date of research and theoretical perspectives in this emerging field. The editors selected authors who are making important forays into our…

This article argues that a native-speaker baseline is a neglected dimension of studies into second language (L2) performance. If we investigate how learners perform language tasks, we should distinguish what performance features are due to their processing an L2 and which are due to their performing a particular task. Having defined what we mean…

Language is a product of both biological and cultural evolution. Clues to the origins of key structural properties of language can be found in the process of cultural transmission between learners. Recent experiments have shown that iterated learning by human participants in the laboratory transforms an initially unstructured artificial language…

There are normally two major research reasons for assessing second and foreign language (L2) knowledge: either to gauge a participant's actual level of competence/proficiency or to assess language development over a period of time. In testing, the corresponding contrasts are typically referred to as proficiency tests on the one hand and…

This article examines sign languages that belong to a complex of indigenous sign languages in Mesoamerica that K'iche'an Maya people of Guatemala refer to collectively as Meemul Tziij. It explains the relationship between the Meemul Tziij variety of the Yukatek Maya village of Chican (state of Yucatan, Mexico) and the hitherto undescribed Meemul…

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that…

In the research conducted by Truscott and Hsu (2008), the authors demonstrate that although rewriting corrected drafts results in lower grammar error rates on the rewritten texts, this effect does not carry over to a subsequent new writing task. The authors conclude that the result indicates that there may have been no language improvement from…

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the…

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) has been discussed in various studies that show that children around age 5 seem to violate Principle B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, and related works), when the antecedent of the pronoun is a name, but not when the antecedent is a quantifier. The analysis we propose can explain the DPBE in languages of…

In the present study, we explore whether multiple data sources may be more effective than single sources at predicting the words that language learners are likely to know. Second language researchers have hypothesized that there is a relationship between word frequency and the likelihood that words will be encountered or used by second language…

Many millenia ago, a number of genetic changes endowed the human species with the remarkable capacity: (1) to construct highly complex systems of expressions--human languages; (2) to copy such systems, once created, from other members of the species; and (3) to use them for communicative and perhaps other purposes. This capacity is not uniform; it…

In the position article to this volume, Klein outlines a set of questions that are relevant for furthering the linguist's understanding of what the cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language might be. He also declares a certain skepticism regarding the likelihood that new methods from other disciplines will provide answers to those…

The effects of age on second language acquisition constitute one of the most frequently researched and debated topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Two different orientations may be distinguished in age-related research: one which aims to elucidate the existence and characteristics of maturational constraints on the human capacity…