This 1986 textbook presents an account of the main concerns, problems and theoretical and practical issues raised by second language acquisition research. Research in this field had been mainly pedagogically oriented, but since the 1970s linguists and psychologists have become increasingly interested in the principles that underlie second language acquisition for the light these throw on how human language processing functions in general. Moreover, it is only through an understanding of these principles that foreign language teaching can become maximally effective. In the first part of his...

Aksu-Koc's empirical research on Turkish children's acquisition of the past tense forms the basis for this original and important contribution to the current debate among psycholinguists on the interrelationship between language and cognitive development. Turkish, in its grammar, makes a clear distinction between direct and indirect experience, separating personal observation of processes from both inference and narrative. This distinction thus provides an ideal method of observing linguistic and neurolinguistic conceptual development. Aksu-Koc exploits this technique to its full advantage in...

Gender is a fascinating category, central and pervasive in some languages and totally absent in others. In this new, overall account of gender systems, over 200 languages are discussed, from English and Russian to Archi and Chichewa. More detailed analysis of individual languages provides clear illustrations of specific types of systems. Gender distinction is often based on sex; sometimes this is only one criterion and the gender of nouns depends on other factors (thus "house" is masculine in Russian, feminine in French and neuter in Tamil). On occasion there are equivalent distinctions such...

Categories of the verb in natural languages include tense, aspect, modality (mood) and voice. Among these, voice, in its rich and diverse manifestations, is perhaps the most complex. But most prior research concentrates on only certain types, predominantly passives. Voice expresses relations between a predicate and a set of nominal positions - or their referents - in a clause or other structure. Grammatical Voice is the first typological study of voice systems based on a multi-language survey. It introduces a threefold classification of voice types, in the first place distinguishing...

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the linguistics of Korean. It presents essential facts about the language: its speakers, its relation to other languages of the world, historical development, dialects (including the differences between South and North Korean), writing systems, the composition and structure of words, and sound patterns and syntax. It provides a wealth of examples and user-friendly descriptions that do not presuppose advanced knowledge of either linguistic theory or Korean on the part of the reader.

This book deals with the question of how children exposed to two languages simultaneously from birth learn to speak those two languages. After a critical and comprehensive survey of most of the literature on the subject, the author concludes that empirically well-documented knowledge in this area is very scant indeed. The core of the book concerns a naturalistic study of a Dutch-English bilingual girl around the age of three. The study's main aim is to explore the nature of early bilingual morphosyntactic development. Detailed analyses of most aspects of this development show that a child who...

Definiteness is the concept expressed by definite articles such as "the," and also by other expressions such as demonstratives ("this," "that") and personal pronouns. This textbook surveys such expressions in the many languages of the world, and also examines the theoretical literature on this aspect of grammar, to establish what definiteness is and how languages can express it.

Categories of the verb in natural languages include tense, aspect, modality (mood) and voice. Among these, voice, in its rich and diverse manifestations, is perhaps the most complex. But most prior research concentrates on only certain types, predominantly passives. Voice expresses relations between a predicate and a set of nominal positions - or their referents - in a clause or other structure. Grammatical Voice is the first typological study of voice systems based on a multi-language survey. It introduces a threefold classification of voice types, in the first place distinguishing...

This book surveys the two main indigenous languages of Japan, Japanese and Ainu. No genetic relationship has been established between them, and structurally they differ significantly. Shibatani has therefore divided his study into two independent parts. The first is the most comprehensive study of the polysynthetic Ainu language yet to appear in English. The second part deals extensively with Japanese. It discusses topics from the evolution of the writing system and the differences between men's and women's speech, to issues of greater theoretical complexity, such as phonology, the lexicon...

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the linguistics of Korean. It presents essential facts about the language: its speakers, its relation to other languages of the world, historical development, dialects (including the differences between South and North Korean), writing systems, the composition and structure of words, and sound patterns and syntax. It provides a wealth of examples and user-friendly descriptions that do not presuppose advanced knowledge of either linguistic theory or Korean on the part of the reader.