There are not many people who can be said to have influenced and impressed researchers in so many disparate areas and language-geographic fields as Lauri Carlson, as is evidenced in the present Festschrift. Lauri’s insight and acute linguistic sensitivity and linguistic rationality have spawned findings and research work in many areas, from non-standard etymology to hard-core formal linguistics...

Over the last two decades, question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject controversy in field third (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between L3 preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at very beginning acquisition pr...

An ubiquitous phenomenon in psychology is the ‘repetition effect’: a repeated stimulus is perceived better on the second occurrence than on the first. Yet, what counts as a repetition? When a spoken word is repeated, is it the acoustic shape or the linguistic type that matters? In the present study, we contrasted the contribution of acoustic and phonological features by using participants with ...

Thirty-five years ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from Recursive Function Theory. These were exciting tools that imparted mathematical precision, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics, to the enterprise of grammar construction. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the linguistic transformation,...

Basic Assumptions and Purpose On a theoretical level, this presentation – which is based on my 2004 monograph Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution – sketches and defends an approach to human linguistic competence that views it as a system of neural link patterns embodying schematic instructions for communicative behavior that are transmitted faithfully enough to qualify as mental or cultural...

Robert Boyle's experimental programme had as its end-product the generation of indisputable matters of fact. In this paper 1analyze the resources used to produce these matters of fact, paying particular attention to linguistic practices. Experimental reports rich in circumstantial detail were designed to enable readers of the text to create a mental image of an experimental scene they did not d...

Introduction. Major health issues and barriers to health services for Latino immigrants were identified through community-based participatory research in Baltimore city. Methods. In collaboration with community partners, five focus groups were conducted among Latino adults from 10 countries and health service providers. Findings. Priorities across groups included chronic diseases, HIV/AIDS and ...

  Drawing on recent developments in linguistic description and applied linguistics, it can be concluded that learning a language necessitates getting to know something and being able to do something with that knowledge: competence, and performance. Structural approach to language description attaches importance to the former; communicative approach to the latter. Appropriate classroom discours...

If a knowledge-based computer program is to produce English texts that are fluent and appropriate to the context of their audience and situation, the program's model of the conceptual information to be communicated must be augmented by a model of the English language, including linguistic information of the kind one finds in grammars and books of rhetoric, such as its constraints, alternative f...

Nigerian language and culture are endangered because of a strong craving to study abroad. The upsurge in the number youths fleeingthe country still grows for many reasons: while some go pursuit university education, others simply search greener pastures. Yet, cultural cum linguistic economic implications this mass exodus supposedly best brains have received little or no scholarly attention. Thi...