This paper attempts to review second language acquisition theory and some of the methods practiced in language classes. The review substantiates that comprehensible input as the crucial determining factor for language acquisition and consciously learned linguistic knowledge can be used only to edit the output of the acquired language sometimes…

American Sign Language (ASL) is the natural and preferred language of the Deaf community in both the United States and Canada. Woodward (1978) estimated that approximately 60% of the ASL lexicon is derived from early 19th century French Sign Language, which is known as "langue des signes francaise" (LSF). The lexicon of LSF and ASL may…

This thesis has two broad goals. The first is to contribute to the study of Arabic phonology particularly syllable structure and syllabification. This will be achieved through examining phenomena related to syllable structure and syllabic weight such as syllabification, stress assignment, epenthesis, syncope, and sonority in three different…

Vietnamese (Vietic, Mon-Khmer, Austroasiatic) is monosyllabic and tonal. Most Mon-Khmer (MK) languages are multisyllabic and atonal. Evidence suggests that Vietnamese (VN) has had its tones less than one millennium, and that other languages (both MK and non-MK) are also acquiring tones, a process called "tonogenesis". Comparing VN's…

This article discusses some apparently paradoxical behavior of the English demonstratives "this/these" and "that/those" as determiners of proper nouns and as metaphorical signals of epistemic and affective stance within the proximal-distal opposition. It is argued that the apparent paradoxes are actually cases of shifting perspectives or points of…

This paper deals with interpersonality in research article abstracts analysed in terms of interactional metadiscourse. The evolution in the distribution of three prominent interactional markers comprised in Hyland's (2005a) model, viz. hedges, boosters and attitude markers, is investigated in three decades of abstract writing in the field of…

The CARIN theory (C. L. Gagne & E. J. Shoben, 1997) proposes that people use statistical knowledge about the relations with which modifiers are typically used to facilitate the interpretation of modifier-noun combinations. However, research on semantic patterns in compounding has suggested that regularities tend to be associated with pairings of…

This paper tests how well two theories of tone-segment interactions account for the lowering effect of so-called depressor consonants on tone in languages of the Shona and Nguni groups of Southern Bantu. I show that single source theories, which propose that pitch lowering is inextricably linked to consonant voicing, as they are reflexes of the…

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of "implicit prosody." Ambiguous Korean sentence…

With particular reference to recent developments (including some in communication-technology), this first of two papers explores the nature of "language change"--its kinds, mechanisms and effects--and some attitudes towards it. It then suggests a case for teaching and learning about language change (bearing in mind, particularly,…

Information packaging researchers have found that certain factors influence active/passive voice alternations: Animacy, Definiteness and Weight influence argument order and thus choice of voice. Researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and psycholinguistics claim that voice is influenced by social factors, e.g. gender, social standing, or…

This thesis investigates the implications of binding phenomena for the development of a reductionist theory of grammatical dependencies. The starting point is the analysis of binding and control in Hornstein (2001, 2009). A number of revisions are made to this framework in order to develop a simpler and empirically more successful account of…

This article asks what applied linguistics can learn from related disciplines with regard to the collection, analysis and representation of qualitative interviews. It assesses the contributions of qualitative sociology, anthropology, discursive psychology and outlines four "discourse dilemmas" which might provide the basis for a more critical and…

Translating for children is increasingly being recognized as a challenge worthy of as much attention as translating for adults. One of the key issues debated in this domain is the choice between "foreignizing" and "domesticating" strategies in relation to the pedagogic or, more generally, ideology forming or ideology-reflecting potential of…

The teaching of the Spanish noun gender system to students is based on a set of generalizations that the last phoneme, or sound, of a noun is an excellent predictor of the gender of that noun (Bull 1965). These generalized norms have been refined over the years and can be found in most textbooks. The norms are taught to students who then apply…