This study examined metalinguistic awareness in children who were becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. The purpose was to determine at what point in emerging bilingualism the previously reported metalinguistic advantages appear and what types of metalinguistic tasks reveal these developmental differences. Participants were 124 children in second and fifth grades who were enroll...

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generallyavailable scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositi...

In this paper, we identify a paradigm of metalinguistic comparatives in Greek headed by the preposition para. Para clauses are lexically distinct from other comparatives clauses in Greek (headed by apo, apoti). Building on earlier intuitions, we propose a semantics of metalinguistic MORE as a contrast between two propositions in terms of how appropriate of preferred they are by some individual....

This study investigated understanding of language ambiguity as a source of individual differences in children’s reading comprehension skill, and the role of peer metalinguistic discussion in fostering comprehension improvement. Twenty-four 7to 9-year-old children worked in pairs to discuss and resolve ambiguities in joking riddles. Their reading comprehension increased significantly more than a...

In ‘‘Intuitions in Linguistics’’ (2006a) and Ignorance of Language (2006b) I took it to be Chomskian orthodoxy that a speaker’s metalinguistic intuitions are provided by her linguistic competence. I argued against this view in favor of the alternative that the intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena. The concern about these linguistic intuitions...

Different theories of SLA offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. We examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners ‘his/her’in English. Learners’ oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to developmental stages;a parallelframework was developed to classifylearner...

This paper describes the outcomes of an investigation into the misconceptions and difficulties encountered when learning grammar. The study is based on evidence collected from a class of twelve-year-olds who were engaged upon a workscheme focusing on grammar,and two cohorts of PGCE English students undertaking an intensive grammar course. The analysis suggests that learning metalinguistic knowl...

Just as it is possible to refer to any entity, concrete or abstract, in extralinguistic reality, it is also possible to refer to any linguistic entity, be that a phoneme, a word, a sentence, or any other linguistic object. Metalinguistic reference can be achieved in two ways, by means of ‘autonymous’ and ‘heteronymous’ mention (cf. Recanati 2000: 137). Autonymous mention is a matter of quotatio...

this study aimed at comparing the impact of two types of teacher feedback on iranian efl learners’ writing ability and their verb tense consistency in l2 writing. following the administration of a standardized language proficiency test (preliminary english test), sixty-two participants were selected and were randomly assigned to the control (direct-only correction) and experimental (direct meta...