Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from "smaller" languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual…

Idiomatic or complex prepositions, phrases that perform the same functions as simple prepositions, are examined in Italian. The analysis is of only one subgroup of idiomatic prepositional phrases, preposition + noun, and looks for classification criteria of theoretical rather than descriptive value. It is concluded that the idiosyncratic behavior…

Offers several justifications for the claim that code-switching is a positive, not a negative, phenomenon. Included are three examples of "mixtilingual" poetry: poetry "mixing languages" in order to evoke different feelings and images within a certain cultural context. The poems mix English and Spanish, English and Italian, and Italian and…

An analysis of subject placement in Italian argues that placement is not determined entirely by case, but also partly by interpretational considerations. The crucial step in the argument is that there are independent well-formedness conditions on discourse structures and that the apparent interpretational effects on preposed subjects of…

An analysis of the nature of secondary predicates takes a comparative approach, using Italian and English. Distributional properties and extraction facts are accounted for, and an explanation for the fact that resultatives are not allowed in Romance languages is sought on the basis of Italian evidence. It is argued that the semantic distinction…

Evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The results of a study show that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. (22 references) (GLR)

An analysis of long-distance anaphora, a binding phenomenon in which reflexives find their antecedents outside their local domain, is presented, using data from English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Icelandic, and Italian. It is found that no approach deals with long-distance anaphors exclusively and elegantly. The binding domain…

Previous theory concerning the variable behavior verbs in unaccusative/unergative alternation in Dutch, Hebrew, and Italian, which concludes that the unergative/unaccusative distinction is not syntactic but aspectual/semantic, is challenged. Discrepancies and inconsistencies are found in the grammatical functions of aspectual functional…

A discussion on the nature of language argues the following: (1) the concept of a closed and finite rule system is inadequate for the description of natural languages; (2) as a consequence, the writing of variable rules to modify such rule systems so as to accommodate the properties of natural language is inappropriate; (3) the concept of such…

This paper proposes the existence of a cognitive process by which multilinguals who incorporate nontarget lexical items from one non-native language into another may (1) come to identify the lexical item transferred from a source to a guest system as belonging to the guest system and (2) fail to recognise the source of their knowledge in the…