While agreeing with Lardiere that the "parameter-resetting" approach to understanding second language acquisition (SLA) needs rethinking, it is suggested that a more construction-based perspective runs the risk of losing deductive and explanatory power. An alternative is to investigate the constraints on feature assembly/re-assembly in second…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Several exercises are presented that are intended to challenge and "limber up" the translator's manipulation of words, meanings, and connotations. The exercises point up the complexity of the translating task and encourage the translator to make the most of this fact. The focus is on French and English. (MSE)

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…