Sign language in the Arab World has been recently recognized and documented. Many efforts have been made to establish the sign language used in individual countries, including Jordan, Egypt, Libya, and the Gulf States, by trying to standardize the language and spread it among members of the Deaf community and those concerned. Such efforts produced…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…

This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. *"Le tigre va le…

This study investigates whether second language (L2) phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of nonnative segments by native segments in learners' speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. We adopt a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton's (1975, 1978)…

This paper reports on two studies that investigated the effectiveness of a contrastive analysis type of pedagogical intervention, which aimed to promote interlanguage development in the use and understanding of English possessive determiners (PDs) among adolescent second language (L2) learners. The first research question asked whether explicit…

Purpose: This investigation expands the notion of academic language to extracurricular activities and provides preliminary data regarding linguistic expectations that are placed on students who are participating in youth sports. Method: Five coaches of young girls' basketball teams (2 competitive; 3 recreational) were observed during practice…

This study investigated the encoding of animate/inanimate distinctions in the pronominal systems of a variety of Bantu languages. Various encoding strategies are found to suggest that there is a strong syntactic opposition between animate and inanimate object markers in Bantu languages. Restricted positions and obligatory presence are particularly…

This paper illustrates the functional similarities between the English and German past perfect tense which are extremely difficult for native Japanese-speaking learners of the two languages. By the time that Japanese university students begin study of the German language, most have had at least 6 years of English language study. Yet, German is…

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…

A study investigated the way given and new information is conveyed in Korean discourse by applying a taxonomy of given-new information, based on English discourse, to Korean. The taxonomy presumes that information packaging in natural language reflects sender's hypotheses about receiver's assumptions, beliefs, and strategies. Two types of Korean…

A discussion of communicative interaction focuses on the knowledge needed to achieve politeness in different languages, especially how that body of knowledge differs across languages and can be taught in foreign language instruction. It is noted that oral communication must accommodate the existing social order by use of appropriate registers.…

A study investigated the phonemic and morphophonemic patterning of the glottal stop in Agutaynen, a Meso-Philippine language, and some comparison with two northern Philippine languages. Agutaynen glottal stop has as its sole origin a neutralization of contrast rule, the operation of which can be noted in three different linguistic environments.…

Questions the effectiveness of contrastive linguistics in measuring the difference between two languages and therefore in predicting the ease or difficulty of acquisition from one to the other. The simplicity of a language is not objectively quantifiable since it is measured as relative to other languages. (Text is in French.) (TL)

This article discusses the history of the Spanish word denoting a particular tree, "secoya," which found its origin in the name of the originator of the Cherokee alphabet "Sekwiyi," moving then into English and subsequently into Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Three aspects of existential sentences in English and Polish are discussed, and on the basis of the considerations of the logical and structural characteristics of existential sentences, some conclusions are drawn concerning the deep structure and derivation of these sentences. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)