The number meaning of grammatically plural nouns is to some extent context sensitive. In negative sentences, plural nouns typically receive an inclusive reading referring to any number of individuals (one or many). This contrasts with their more frequent exclusive reading referring to a group of two or more individuals. The present study…

This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish-English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a…

Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages. The present experiment aimed at…

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case--which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2; 6…

Discusses the use of prepositional phrases as subjects and objects through consideration and analysis of: (1) characteristics of such phrases; (2) category status of prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions; and (3) sentences containing prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions. (CB)

This report presents a contrastive analysis of the phonological and grammatical systems of English and Polish. The analysis is intended as a resource in teaching Polish to speakers of English. Consequently, areas of special difficulty for the English-speaking learner are stressed: the phonology of segmental phonemes, the morphology of nouns, noun…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Systematic Typological Contrast Between English and Portuguese" (Mary Aizawa Kato); "An Accuracy Order of English Sentential Complements for Native Speakers of Persian and Spanish" (Janet I. Anderson); "Remarks on 'Particle Movement' and…

This collection of 31 papers is the second resulting from the Polish-English Contrastive Project. The overall purposes of the project are to prepare a Polish-English contrastive grammar and to develop pedagogical material. The basic model used for the research is the transformational generative one. This volume is divided into three sections: (1)…