Research over the last decades has shown that language development in its multiple forms is characterized by a succession of stable and unstable states. However, the variation observed is neither expected nor can it be accounted for on the basis of traditional learning concepts conceived of within the Universal Grammar (UG) paradigm. In this…

The role of homophony in language change and in child morphological acquisition has often been made recourse to. Regarding the former it has been proposed that the threat of homophony can prevent a sound change from going to completion. With respect to the latter, it has been vaguely and contradictorily claimed that homophonous morphological…

This contribution assesses in quantitative terms frequent collocates and major senses of "between" and "through" in the corpus of Cameroonian English (CCE), the corpus of East-African (Kenya and Tanzania) English which is part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project (ICE-EA), and the London Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus…

Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that…

In Spanish, aspectual morphology is a critical element that speakers use to narrate and discuss past events. Previous qualitative accounts have shown that native Spanish-speakers apply past-tense aspectual morphology to verbs in order to distinguish between events viewed as perfective (bounded, discrete events) and imperfective (unbounded,…

Students will have to use language all their lives, whether they are signing off on stock investments, guiding airplanes to land, or writing the next great novel. Language is the stuff of communication, and English happens to be the most commonly used language in the world. However, Canadian schools do not adequately prepare young people to use…

The obligatory use of the preposition a with animate, specific direct objects in Spanish ("Juan conoce a Maria" "Juan knows Maria") is a well-known instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM; Torrego, 1998; Leonetti, 2004). Recent studies have documented the loss and/or incomplete acquisition of several grammatical features in Spanish heritage…

Owing to analyses of large spoken corpora the linguistic knowledge of conversation has grown in recent years exponentially. Up until now little of this knowledge has trickled down to the EFL classroom. One of the reasons, this paper argues, is the failure in the relevant literature to spell out clearly how teaching conversational grammar affects…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

This paper documents the occurrence of form variability through diminutive "wordplay", and examines whether this variability facilitates or hinders morphology acquisition in a richly inflected language. First, in a longitudinal speech corpus of eight Russian mothers conversing with their children (1.6-3.6), and with an adult, the use of diminutive…

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the variation underlying subject-verb agreement in the spoken French interlanguage of Irish classroom and study abroad learners. Results outline the range of factors constraining that variation, such as the learners' level of informal contact with the language, as well as linguistic factors such as…

Presents a survey of the French indefinite "tu/vous" in in earlier periods and in a range of varieties. Draws on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy in Northern France to investigate the extent to which this use of second person pronouns helps to avoid ambiguity and co-occurs with another grammatical variable. (Author/VWL)

Discusses a corpus-based study that focuses on word epenthesis.Provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies categorically in some environments and variably in others. Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors. Interprets such grammatical conditioning as…

Examines the reduction of syntactic options in South Texas Spanish narrative discourse during the nineteenth century. Argues that nineteenth century Texas Spanish made ample use of the absolute construction as an orientation strategy in narrative discourse. (Author/VWL)

Explores the notion of lexical diffusion in relation to an ongoing change in modern French nasal vowels. Data are interviews with 42 Parisians. Reveals an independent lexical and grammatical conditioning, one not entirely explicable in terms of stress or phonetics. (Author/VWL)