Provides a new perspective on whether there is a correlation between finiteness and verb placement in second language acquisition by analyzing data from speakers of Romance languages learning German as a second language. Verbs are classified as thematic and nonthematic and analyzed with respect to overt subject-verb agreement and verb placement as…

Discussion of the multilingual mind's organization proposes the Least Expansion Hypothesis, that knowledge of any language is organized in the same cognitive manner. A slot is created for knowledge of each level of language, storing knowledge of all languages pertaining to that level. A new knowledge unit is entered only when differing…

Examines the behavior of the morpheme, um, in Toba Batak and Tagalog, which alternates as a prefix or an infix, arguing that the variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Three patterns of variation that occur with um are described, noting that the stages involved in changing from infixed to prefixed positions over time are…

Presents contrasting views on the sequencing of verbal-complement structures. The first article has been reviewed by the editorial panel and accepted for publication; the second is a commissioned response, to which the author of the original author is invited to reply. (Author/VWL)

Suggests that students need to learn to "read" the cultural texts surrounding them. Argues that there is great need for including analyses of popular culture in the college curriculum. Presents a unit to help students gain a greater appreciation for the influence that advertising has upon them and the subtlety with which it manipulates people,…

Compared two Arabic stories and their English translations and two Arabic and English stories with reference to sentence organization, coordination, and subordination. Showed that Arabic and English sentences are differently organized, coordination is more common in Arabic than in English, while subordination is more frequent in English than in…

The durational characteristics of novel words produced in repeated trials were evaluated in separate groups of children with, and without speech delay (SD). Children produced disyllabic novel words containing either a trochaic or iambic stress pattern. Results of acoustic analysis indicated a significant interaction between trial number and…

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses…

Technical characteristics of Slosson Phonics and Structural Analysis Test (SP-SAT) scores were studied using three independent samples of boys and girls aged 6 years, 6 months, through 9 years, 11 months. A decision efficiency study (n = 100) resulted in a total predictive value of .86 (sensitivity = .95, specificity = .77, positive predictive…

The extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs has been identified as a characteristic feature of New Varieties of English across the world, including the English of black South Africans (BSAfE). This paper examines the use of the progressive aspect in BSAfE, by doing a comparative analysis of three corpora of argumentative student…

The present study aims to explore the role of Chinese EFL learners' rhetorical strategy use in relation to their achievement in English writing in Taiwan. It has been argued that traditional Chinese text structures (indirect style) continue to influence the contemporary English writing of Chinese students in expository writing text. The manner of…

INTENDED AS AN INTRODUCTORY COLLEGE LINGUISTICS TEXT, THIS BOOK PRESENTS IN AN ORDERLY, AUTONOMOUS WAY THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED FACTS AND PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTICS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE A PROFESSIONAL NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT LANGUAGE. DIVIDED INTO TWELVE SECTIONS, THE BOOK DESCRIBES IN DETAIL IN A PART DEVOTED TO PHONOLOGY, (1) PHONEMES, (2)…

The comments presented here were made after the presentation of four papers and commentary by two other symposium participants. They address issues in language comparison and classification. First, comments are made on the papers ("An African Test Case in Comparative Methodology,""The Mathematics of Multilateral Comparison,""Testing a Basic…

Increasingly, foreign language textbooks have espoused a pragmatic approach to the teaching of language, underscoring the value of communicative competence, functional language use, and conversational effectiveness, while at the same time retaining to some degree the more traditional goals of structural analysis and "knowledge about" language and…

Because students encounter a steady stream of new words in their reading, structural analysis--the ability to gain information about the meaning, pronunciation, and part of speech of new words from their prefixes, roots, and suffixes--is an important component of skilled reading. It follows, then, that effective reading instruction should include…