Incompleteness of competence--lack of command of certain second-language (L2) aspects--and divergence--interlanguage representations of L2 properties different from native representations--are distinct states of grammatical competence, as seen in French and English speakers of Italian (L2). Discussion argues that competence differences reflect…

Four experiments on the acquisition of binding are compared, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding is found to lag behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and R-expressions. (61 references) (Author/LB)

A study of 15 fathers and their 16 sons in an italophone community in Montreal (Canada) focused on the usage of Italian, French, and English in communication between generations and in a variety of activities. Data were drawn from 45 hours of taped conversation in home and work settings, which included 4,848 instances of language contact. Of the…

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…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among receptive language skills, type of second-language acquisition program, and reading skills among Italian speaking first grade students in the English schools of Montreal, Canada. Half of the fourteen teachers and their classes were randomly assigned to the Richards-Gibson…

Analyzes ellipsis, pronominalization, emphatic stress, the indefinite article, the definite article, and initialization as used by child and adult speakers of English, Hungarian, and Italian. Conclusions: marked differences between the languages; early learning of the functions of the devices; some changes with age. (Author/EJS)

Describes the development of the concept of language in an Italian/English bilingual child from age 2.0 to 2.5 years. (CFM)

States the differences between the classes of structures that admit a progressive interpretation in English and Japanese and discusses progressive aspect in these two languages on the basis of proposed universally valid definitions. It is concluded that the contrastive behavior of the English "be-ing" construction and the Japanese…

Examines the dual mechanism hypothesis, which argues that the apparent contrast, in English inflectional morphology, between a rule-based default procedure, generating regular past-tense forms, and listed irregular forms stored in an associative net, reflects universal constraints on the properties of possible morphological systems. The study…

Describes ALICE (Acquisition of Linguistic Items in the Context of Examples), an interactive computer system which relies on a pragmatic representation of conceptual differences of linguistic terms in several languages, and offers diagnostic and remedial strategies for mistakes made by students. Subordinate conjunctions in English, French, and…

Examines the socio-pragmatic construction and textualization of scholarly Acknowledgements in English and Italian journals from a genre-analytic perspective. Points of difference or similarity between corpora and academic cultures are explored with special attention to such issues as generic complexity and staging, personal involvement, and peer…

Reports on a project on trilingualism currently in progress. A brief literature review indicates the diversity of trilingualism and trilingual situations. The article then focuses on three sets of trilinguals in Melbourne, Australia, Dutch-German-English, Hungarian-German-English, and Italian-Spanish-English, and considers interlingual strategies…

The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare…

An investigation was conducted by students in a linguistics seminar which had two parts, a matched-guise questionnaire and a semantic differential questionnaire. The content and results of the latter are presented here. The objective of this part of the study was to determine what attitudes French-speaking Swiss students had toward languages they…