This study investigated how standard and substandard varieties of first language (L1) Dutch affect grammatical gender assignments to nouns in second language (L2) German. While German distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, the masculine--feminine distinction has nearly disappeared in Standard Dutch. Many substandard Belgian…

The aim of this article is to describe young children's beliefs about language and bilingualism as they are expressed in verbal utterances. The data is from Swedish-medium preschool units in three different sites in Finland. It was generated through ethnographic observations and recordings of the author's interactions with the children. The…

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a…

This study investigates the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by 60 English learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Two oral production tasks and one interpretation task show that although the Imperfect is used from early on, the full array of interpretations associated with this form…

British Columbia (BC), Canada, is home to 34 Indigenous languages, all of them classified as endangered. Considerable work is underway by First Nation communities to revitalize their languages. Linguists classify many of the languages of BC as polysynthetic, meaning that words are composed of many morphemes, or units of meaning. While strong…

A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preceding the head to facilitate resolution of such ambiguity in Japanese. Evidence from English…

Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Northern Mexico of great typological, theoretical, and historical significance. This paper presents an overview and background of the Choguita Rarámuri language description and documentation project and provides a guide to the documentary collection emerging from this project. This…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

The ability to use language effectively in communication is regarded as important as knowledge of grammatical rules in the communicative competence models. Pragmatic competence, namely the ability to understand and use linguistic forms appropriately according to context, is thus accepted as a vital component of language ability. Recently,…

This article documents the current research efforts of a research team at a Colombian university to explore the new forms of literacies in second languages in the city. The different research projects from this research team aim to break the social imaginaries, often perpetuated in policies, that people in cities are not using English as a…

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and…

Diagnostic language assessment has received increased research interest in recent years, with particular attention on methods through which diagnostic information can be gleaned from standardized proficiency tests. However, diagnostic procedures in the broader sense have been inadequately theorized to date, with the result that there is still…

Research on reported speech is old, but scholars working in this field are inclined to see its roots in Davidson's (1968) paratactic account of indirect reports. Although Davidson aimed at a "truth-conditional" theory of indirect reports which could challenge ideational, use, and psychological theories, his paratactic view--of which the…

The phonological inventory of Old Okinawan is often reconstructed according to modern Ryukyuan languages. Although the importance of historical resources is never ignored in the study of Okinawan historical linguistics, reconstruction based on historical sources is not well investigated yet, due to the two reasons that a) authors of previous…

Reduplication of numerals and pronouns in Kannada is shown to be subject to locality conditions similar to those constraining binding. This dissertation explores an account of distributivity which exploits the similarity to binding, arguing that the source of the distributive reading in Numeral Reduplication is a bound element. [The dissertation…