If good proficiency in L2 entails the acquisition not only of many single words but of many lexical chunks as well, it must then be asked how all this additional lexis is to be committed to long-term memory in the limited time available on non-intensive classroom-based language courses. If it is the case that a significant fraction of…

This study investigated whether pre-task planning that embeds grammatical guidance to attend to a specific L2 form might be a suitable pedagogical choice in beginning-level foreign language classrooms. First-year high school students of English in Japan were asked to do an oral story-retelling task with a class partner under one of three…

This article explores how collocation relates to lexical technicality, and how the relationship can be exploited for teaching EAP to second-year engineering students. First, corpus data are presented to show that complex noun phrase formation is a ubiquitous feature of engineering text, and that these phrases (or collocations) are highly…

This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1):(1) The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did [delta], too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb…

This paper focuses on the temporal and modal meanings associated with root infinitives (RIs) and other non-finite clauses in several typologically diverse languages--English, Russian, Greek and Dutch. I discuss the role that event structure, aspect, and modality play in the interpretation of these clauses. The basic hypothesis is that in the…

This article focuses on the development of vocabulary among English language learners. The author first defines what a "word" means, then discusses five aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Drawing on Swain (1993), the author identifies three main goals of vocabulary learning. The rest of the article is devoted to the description of six…

The present study investigated the relationship between L2 incidental lexical gain during reading and the variables of clause type and word saliency. Lexical gain was defined as gain of grammatical class and word meaning and was compared for target items in dependent and independent clauses. Word saliency was a measurement of the learners'…

This study investigates the phenomenon of "Locative Inversion" in Cantonese. The term "Locative Inversion" indicates that the locative phrase (LP) syntactic process in Cantonese and the appears at the sentence-initial position and its logical subject occurs postverbally. It is demonstrated that this Locative Inversion is a…

The structures of quantifier phrases in Thai are studied in the X-Syntax framework. Syntactic and semantic arguments are provided to prove that this model remedies the deficiency of traditional and early transformational grammar as it provides insightful analyses based on distinctions between intermediate level nodes that display internal…

The author divides the appositive noun phrases in German into two types, the relative and the performative, and describes the structure of each type. (Text is in German.) (TL)

The development of a new grammar of English for machine translation systems at Weidner Communications Corporation is described. Although the project began with the intention of simply modifying the grammar rules already in use in the translation system, the reorganization of the grammar was deemed necessary for providing a principled manner of…

The form of the print poetic line is partially determined by the expectations of the potential readers since authors, as participants in the common literary heritage of their culture, make use of the common expectations of that literary heritage. As a test of this hypothesis, one poem by James Dickey and one by Ted Olson were printed as prose, and…

A CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY OF CERTAIN TYPES OF SENTENCE EMBEDDING IN ENGLISH IS THE DELETION OF THE INITIAL NOUN PHRASE OF THE EMBEDDED SENTENCE WHEN THE NOUN PHRASE IS IDENTICAL TO SOME NOUN PHRASE IN THE MAIN SENTENCE. EXAMPLES OF THIS PHENOMENON ARE SENTENCES LIKE "JOHN CONDESCENDED TO GO" AND "JOHN DEFIED BILL TO GO."…

THE VARIOUS TYPES OF PRENOMINAL MODIFIERS IN ENGLISH ARE STUDIED WITHIN THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. TWO DISTINCT, BUT INTERRELATED PROBLEMS ARE INVOLVED--THE DERIVATION OF EACH OF THE TYPES OF SINGLE MODIFIERS, EITHER TRANSFORMATIONALLY OR FROM CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE RULES, AND THE GRAMMATICAL IMPLICATIONS OF COMBINING THEM…

In this paper the author shows that dependency grammars are not only equivalent to structure-free phrase-structure grammars (i.e., equally adequate), but are even more informative: they express both the "is a" relation which phrase-structure grammars express and the "governs" relation which phrase-structure grammars obscure. It…