In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch…

The central purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inalienable possession (IP) in Romance languages hinges more on inferences than is commonly assumed. Most of the analysis concerns Spanish because that language provides the best evidence of how IP is non-grammatical in the sense that it is free of morpho-syntactic constraints. French and…

No formal notion of markedness has been advanced for syntactic-semantic features of language. A hypothesis is presented which states that if all related features are defined as comprising sets, then it is possible to predict the occurrence of a member of a set by the absence of any other member of the set. Any lexical item subcategorized for…

Paper delivered at the Annual Meeting, Modern Language Association of America, December 29, 1970, in New York City. (DS)

Describes successful experiment in teaching of medieval literature to elementary French language classes in the Cincinnati public schools. Purpose was to strengthen linguistic awareness and expand social studies unit on medieval France. (BK)

Argues that a Universal Grammar (UG)-based analysis for the three stages of NEG-placement is not only possible, but in fact provides independent support for UG-based analyses of the developmental sequence found in first-language Romance language and second-language German verb placement. (41 references) (GLR)

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words.…

After an introduction to the Italian linguistic situation, highlighting the remarkable number of language varieties present in Italy today, the paper goes on to review briefly the history of micronationalism in Italy, and to propose a classification of language planning based on the distinction between macro- and micronationalism. There follows a…

This paper focuses on the production of Master's theses at Howard University, Department of Romance Languages, over 60 years on the African diaspora, specifically on Black studies and themes in French and Spanish literature from 1930-1960. Howard University was the first of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to offer graduate…

This is a general, descriptive survey of some of the most important and most specialized bibliographic indexes to periodical literature in the Romance languages. The annotated list includes seven categories: General, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Special Subjects and Books and Sets. (CHK)

A short description of the wide variety in the listing of compound prepositions in most dictionaries. A few suggestions for systematization are made. (AMH)