Discussion of the Spanish indeterminate reflexive construction, the impersonal reflexive, finds that prototype theory allows this subjectless Spanish construction to be included within the category of generally subject-bearing indeterminates in Romance languages. (MSE)

Reports three studies of comprehension of French subject relative clauses and two forms of object relative clauses. The first tested the hypothesis that competition between noun phrases, memory load, and perspective maintenance determine difficulty of role assignment in reversible relative clauses; others compared subject relatives and inverted…

Reviews two guides on the Child Language Data Exchange (CHILDES) project, both of which provide tools for analyzing talk. (Author/VWL)

Reviews core features of the disorganized speech seen in schizophrenia and to illustrate how Deaf persons with schizophrenia may display such language anomalies. Discusses the difficulties involved in studying schizophrenic language in general and of schizophrenic signing in particular. (Author/VWL)

Reviews the history of applied linguistics together with the history of the journal "Language Learning," indicating the journal's particular place in that larger history and honoring its 50th anniversary. (Author/JL)

Reviews research on language learning and age, and presents a summary of the conclusions on second language acquisition and mature age learners from key writers in the field. (Author/VWL)

Reviews research that has been emerging from the availability of corpora on the grammar of spoken English. Presents arguments for the view that spoken and written language utilize the same basic grammatical repertoire, however different their implementations of it are. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the phenomenon of communicative language testing as it emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a reaction against tests constructed of multiple choice items and the perceived overemphasis of reliability. Traces the legacy of the communicative movement from its first formulation, through present conundrums, to tomorrow's research…

Reacts to a response by Simard and Wong (2001) to Tomlin and Villa's (1994) discussion of a model that postulates a fine-grained analysis of attention for second language acquisition and the prediction that awareness at the level of detection is not crucial for further processing of second or foreign language data. (Author/VWL)

Surveys recent research on the first and second language acquisition of temporal and aspectual properties of natural languages. Three recently published books are discussed in the context of the primacy or aspect hypothesis and the prototype, the connectionist, and the discourse explanations for the attested acquisition sequences. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on day-to-day issues of running a Mi'kmaq school. Argues that Sociolinguistics must incorporate a real-world understanding of language. (Author/VWL)

Presents a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics, assessing the state of acquisition research in interlanguage pragmatics, surveying work in interlanguage pragmatics that either directly examines or appeals to grammatical competence, showing how acquisition studies in…

Presents a semantic analysis of English progressive as an intentional operator within the framework of modal semantics. The treatment allows a combination of the central idea that the progressive's meaning has a major modal component with insights of other theories. Using a more sophisticated background theory of modality allows natural solutions…

Explores and describes from a crosslinguistic perspective, some of the major structural irregularities that characterize poetry in Italian Sign Language and distinguish poetic from nonpoetic texts. Reviews findings of previous studies of signed language poetry, and points out issues that need to be clarified to provide a more accurate description…

Category-specific disorders are frequently explained by suggesting that living and non-living things are processed in separate subsystems (e.g. Caramazza & Shelton, 1998). If subsystems exist, there should be benefits for normal processing, beyond the influence of structural similarity. However, no previous study has separated the relative…