This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learners acquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectional morphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship as well as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressed by a pattern like "the man is go".…

This book is an introduction to linguistics, written for the beginning student. Among the topics explored are speculations about the origins of language, its nature, how it grows, and how it changes. Other topics include what is essential in the structure of language, the similarities and differences among languages, how the varying patterns of…

Presents a systematic comparison of the function of voice alterations in three genetically unrelated languages--Biblical Hebrew, Chinese, and English. It is shown that passive or passivelike function can be divided into a number of discrete functional types, each of which is associated with a certain combination of translation equivalents in the…

Several aspects of language--code, relation of structure to meaning, creativity, capacity to influence thought--are discussed, as well as reasons for including foreign language study in school and university. (RM)

The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis…

This paper focuses on the mechanism by which the successful learner acquires a second language. The author postulates a core language, the common core of the speaker's native and target languages, and states that the second language becomes an extension of this common core. Whatever language-specific features are added while acquiring the second…