This volume brings together theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingualism and discusses their implications for L2 pedagogy. The book is organized into three sections that focus on prominent linguistic and cognitive theories and together provide a compelling set of state-of-the-art works. Part I…

Variation in verbal morphology is a phenomenon which has been the object of linguistic research for a long time. Two competing sets of predictions have been put forth to account for the distribution of verbal inflections in learner language: The Aspect Hypothesis posits that learners predominantly use inflections to indicate categories of lexical…

In the past, social lectologists have not considered their work as contrastive linguistics. One reason is that sociolects of a language differ quantitatively; differences lie in the frequency patterns with which certain forms occur in each lect. Contrastive linguistics deals with standard or idealized languages, while sociolects are often…

In recent years a considerable amount of interest has developed in language variability and in the educational problems connected with it. This volume is a report of linguistic research on the variable language behavior in a community of American English speakers, specifically on some aspects of tense marking in Black English. The following topics…

A variety of types of evidence are examined to help determine the true nature of "deep structure" and what, if any, implications this has for linguistic theory as well as culture theory generally. The evidence accumulated over the past century on the nature of phonetic and phonemic systems is briefly discussed, and the following areas of…