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…

The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed…

This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical gender facilitation and inhibition in second language (L2) learners' spoken word recognition. Native speakers of languages that have grammatical gender are sensitive to gender marking when hearing and recognizing a word. Gender facilitation refers to when a given noun that is preceded by an…

The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the…

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)

Compares the results from monolingual children with object omissions in bilingual children who have acquired two languages simultaneously. Claims that the difference between monolingual and bilingual children is due to crosslinguistic influences in bilingual children. (Author/VWL)

Comments are provided by ten authors in response to an article on language separation and crosslinguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Responds to comments by various researchers on an early article presented in the same issue of this journal, claiming that language separation and crosslinguistic influence coexist in bilingual first language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

This book represents, in part, the written record of the "Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages: Application of Generative Grammar to Their Description and Teaching," held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in February 1971. The aim of the Symposium was to bring forth contributions in the description of Romance languages, to draw…

Derivations of the term "gerund" are examined as they pertain to native English speakers learning French, Italian, and/or Spanish. The form's etymology is chronicled from Latin, and its current usage in student textbooks in the three languages is examined. A solution to the terminological confusion surrounding the term is proposed. (41…

Italian pedagogical texts in general hold the position that the partitive is not obligatory as it is in French. However, some of these texts devote a great deal of time to repetition and transformation drills while others never mention the construction at all until the chapters on the pronoun replacement of accusative complements. Italian phrase…

This selective bibliography lists 4 books and 11 journal articles dealing with Italian-English contrastive studies. The entries range in date from 1957 to 1973 with the majority published since 1965. The books cited are American or Italian publications and the articles appeared in well-known European or American pedagogical language journals. (TL)

Analyzes data on the acquisition of German by Italian and Spanish speakers. Findings reveal that children learning a first language and adults learning a second language build up syntactic structure in much the same manner, and propose that the weak continuity approach of language acquisition accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.…

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…