The acquisition of negative forms by a Jordanian Arabic speaker as evidenced in utterances from 19 months of age is examined. The language corpus consisted of selective samples of spontaneous daily speech and biweekly recorded speech sessions. Results suggest that although the subject's negation system is incomplete, it will be acquired by age 5.…

After a discussion of the Arabic stress rules, an experiment is described which looked at two questions: (1) how consistent Saudi students of English as a second language (ESL) are in avoiding the assignment of stress to English final syllables with a consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) configuration, where Arabic stress rules agree with…

Research in contrastive linguistics suggests that in the teaching of English pronunciation to native speakers of Spanish, it is important for teachers to consider the aspects of each language expressed through different suprasegmentals, or prosodic features. What is often stated at the syntactic and/or lexical levels in Spanish is expressed in…

The paper explores the significance of a contrast between generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), a context-free grammar with a well structured theory of features, and head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), a mechanism for increasing the power of GPSG by introducing head-wrapping and lexical rules, using examples from Mandarin Chinese.…

The distributional and interpretive properties of the reciprocal "selo" in Korean are analyzed and compared with reciprocals in other languages, particularly Japanese and English. It is proposed that if it can be assumed that there are two homophonous "selos" in Korean, four of the five idiosyncratic properties of…

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…

An examination of the effectiveness of EA, CA, and students' perception of difficulty in predicting and explaining language learning difficulties. (RM)

Indo-Chinese immigrants to Western countries often have some knowledge of French. When the language of the community to which they have come is related to French, favorable and unfavorable language learning situations may arise. In the case of immigration to English-speaking countries, some specific lexical transfer processes may occur because…

A study was undertaken to examine how the variables that comprise the construct social situation (interlocutor, setting, and topic) influenced which language variety--standard English (SE) or black English (BE)--was chosen as a means of communication within a black English-speaking community and how that language variety was used to elaborate…

The use of error analysis in second language instruction is discussed. Error analysis is seen as an effective aid to second language remedial teaching if errors are treated as evidence of learners' strategies, and analyzed in terms of their significance. A rule-oriented analysis explains why errors are made and implies what ought to be done to…

A frequency count was conducted of linguistic features in the English of the Philippine mass media. Philippine English was found to have a smaller inventory of phonological units than Received Standard English. Vowel reduction does not seem to be prevalent. The collapsing of phonological distinctions is most evident in vowels and fricatives.…

MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY, WHICH SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN THE INITIAL BASIS FOR CHINESE DIALECT CLASSIFICATION, ALONG WITH GEOGRAPHIC PROXIMITY HAS PROVIDED A FAIRLY REALISTIC GROUPING OF THE MANDARIN DIALECTS. IT NOW SEEMS DESIRABLE TO WORK OUT A FORMAL DEFINITION IN PRECISE LINGUISTIC TERMS OF WHAT CONSTITUTES A MANDARIN DIALECT AND TO DISCOVER WHETHER…