The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N = 22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Sociolinguistic competence is not often examined in nonnative English acquisition. This is particularly true for features where the variants are neither stylistically nor socially constrained, but rather are acceptable in all circumstances. Learning to use a language fully, however, implies being able to deal with this type of…

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in…

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject--verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of "attraction" errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a…

First part of a continued article. (DS)

Uses a quantified version of a syntactic acquisition hierarchy to compare syntactic development in second language learners to that of other components of grammar, particularly inflectional morphology. (CB)

Mnemonic devices summarize and simplify grammar rules, especially when applied to the verb forms found in Romance languages. The article presents two mnemonic devices helpful in summarizing the uses of two verb tenses. These include coining a word to illustrate a rule and projecting irregular verb forms on a Mexican "sombrero." (four references)…

Argues that root infinitives produced by Italian toddlers learning a second language are truncated structures, arising from the option of "stripping off" external clausal layers. The basic properties of the construction are shown to be amenable to the Truncation Hypothesis, in that root infinitives are incompatible with /wh/ elements,…

All modern Romance languages except Rumanian have a class of causative + infinitive construction in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive. This article investigates the question of how agentivization of the infinitive subject is to be handled in these languages. (DS)

Four games for use in the foreign language classroom are described. The first, "A Shopping Game," by Gordon Hartig, is played on a game board in the German classroom and provides practice in producing sentences with the preposition "in," which in some instances takes the dative and in others takes the accusative. A diagram of the game board is…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…