The construction of general linguistic theories is subject to errors of fact and perspective. The theoretical linguist is inclined by the nature of his work to fall into such errors because he/she is obliged to generalize about many languages on the basis of research done in one or a few. The scope of this task inevitably leads to a failure to…

A contrastive analysis (CA) does not require commitment to directionality. Even asymmetrical interlingual correspondence can be handled by adirectional statements. If well executed, a CA is capable of handling three pairs of L2 learning phenomena: (1) going from language A to language B and vice versa; (2) productive and receptive command; and (3)…

This refresher course in Dutch consists of eight volumes (Books I-IV, each in two parts). Book I, which begins on the intermediate level, presents the sound system of Dutch with accompanying drills. These provide practice in sound-to-spelling correspondence, and contrastive English-Dutch phonology. Books II and III are comprised of six units of…

This paper proposes a set of hypotheses on the nature of interrogration as a possible language universal. Examples and phrase structure rules and diagrams are given. Examining Tamazight and English, genetically unrelated languages with almost no contact, the author distinguishes two types of interrogation: (1) general, querying acceptability to…

This work is an English translation of the author's classic "Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze," first published in 1941. It is considered the most representative and comprehensive of the author's phonological writings, dealing not only with phonological typology but related problems of language acquisition and phonemic regression…

This paper suggests that traditional syntax describes a sentence's syntactic structure, and that verb valence theory describes a sentence's semantic structure. According to this theory, a verb has a certain valence, or power to attract a certain number of "adjuncts." It is further shown that a given semantic structure can be converted into…

Recent work in word-order typology has demonstrated that the dominant order of verbs and objects (or complements) correlates well with the general ordering tendencies of languages. The work on German reported in this paper suggests, however, that certain traits, such as the order of adverbials, are influenced not only by general ordering…

The UNT project (Instructional Methods in German), begun in 1965 and ended in 1974, had as its principal aims (1) to investigate scientifically certain prerequisites for and methodological approaches to teaching German to Swedish comprehensive school pupils and (2) in the light of this investigation and with the aid of successive trails and…

This paper is intended to be the first part of a study contrasting the subjunctive of French with that of English and comparing it in both languages with the syntactic devices that can replace it. It examines the syntactic constraints on the use of subjunctive forms in French, the semantic contrast between indicative and subjunctive forms, and the…

In the past, social lectologists have not considered their work as contrastive linguistics. One reason is that sociolects of a language differ quantitatively; differences lie in the frequency patterns with which certain forms occur in each lect. Contrastive linguistics deals with standard or idealized languages, while sociolects are often…

The paper investigates the problems of assembling, describing and computerizing corpora, defined as collections of "texts assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect or other subject of a language, to be used for linguistic analysis." Specific reference is made to the formation of the Brown Standard Corpus. The formation of…

This is a two-way contrastive analysis of the use of the article in English and Hungarian. The study works in both theoretical and applied contrastive linguistics by stating the rules governing determination and developing a methodology for analysis, and by noting language acquisition difficulties to reduce language learning interference. Part One…

This paper discusses error analysis as one source of evidence for an overall theory of second language acquisition. Four related areas which form the context for error analysis are discussed in relation to second language learning and the goals and methodology of error analysis; (1) theories of the nature of language which determine theories of…

Syntactic differences between languages are the focus of attention in this approach to contrastive study of grammatical categories. The categories of the first language are listed in a "translation-paradigm" opposite the possible categories of the target language after translation of the corpus. Three examples which contrast the clause, verbal…

Earlier reports from the GUME project (Goteborg, UndervisningsMetod i Engelska-Gothenburg/ Teaching/Methods/English) have shown that different methods of teaching English produce no significant differences in learning effects. In the present study, a direct continuation of earlier ones, modifications in design, teaching strategies, etc., were made…