The world's languages display important differences in their rhythmic organization; most particularly, different languages seem to privilege different phonological units (mora, syllable, or stress foot) as their basic rhythmic unit. There is now considerable evidence that such differences have important consequences for crucial aspects of language…

Data from one English-Italian bilingual child (1;10-3;1) are presented in this study which challenge the hypothesis that the consistent realization of overt subjects in English is caused by the emergence of finite verbal morphology in the child's grammar. The argument is made for the emergence of subjects as an independent grammatical property of…

Both Italian and English have four degrees of stress: emphatic, main, secondary and weak. This paper outlines some similarities, then reviews differences between the languages that can cause difficulties in learning the second language. (CHK)

The simultaneous acquisition of Italian and English by a child living in Italy, the son of an American mother and Italian father, is discussed by his mother. In particular, the development of his vocabulary is analyzed. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

Conducted a series of experiments in German, Dutch, French, Italian, and English to show that four factors systematically interact when people interpret spatial expressions: the reference object being intrinsically oriented or not; the preposition that is used; the social characteristics of the discourse situation; and the prepositional inventory…

Presents a contrastive study of connectives such as "in case that,""provided that," and "unless" focusing on the semantic properties of these items and their semantic and pragmatic equivalence across English and Italian. The article emphasizes that in its approach, pragmatic equivalence is strictly related to semantic…

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…

First results of a survey of English use in 202 Italo-Australian subjects in 46 situations show a widespread shift to English, beginning with younger (first generation) subjects and increasing dramatically among members of the second generation. Italo-Australians' English usage depends more on personal characteristics of speakers than on topic or…

This investigation examined the possibility that features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of specifically language-impaired children. (46 references) (JL)

Argues that the use of thanks in closing conversations reflects not only situational parameters but also local concerns of conversational management. Analysis of naturally occurring data from English and Italian service encounters suggests that cross-cultural differences in closings may be in part the result of differences in the preferred…