Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region. By analyzing the writings o...

A lot of discourses about the so-called « screen civilization » pay little attention to screens. They usually speculate about a supposed cyberspace instead of examining the visible forms of effective communication. This paper looks at what is visible or invisible on computer-supported medias. To do this, it considers both the semiotics of visible signs displayed on the screen and the metasemiot...

In this article Paul’s argumentation is analysed from the perspective of sophistic rhetoric. In the first section the question is discussed what it means to label Paul’s rhetoric in his Letter to the Galatians ‘sophistic.’ To that end, an attempt is made to reconstruct the view of a contemporary critical reader who did not share Paul’s presuppositions and who was well acquainted with the discus...

Several studies of L2 learners’ interlanguage have addressed the complexity of the English adpositional system due to several reasons like L1 transfer, lack of knowledge in L2 and the strong collocational relations of prepositions with other elements of the English language. The major purpose of the present study is to evaluate the performance of Iranian students in dealing with three broad cat...

This paper explores the ways in which the transfer of assumptions from first language (L1) writing can help the process of writing in second language (L2). In learning second language writing skills, learners have two primary sources from which they construct a second language system: knowledge and skills from first language and input from second language. To investigate the relative impact of ...

Third language (L3) acquisition differs from first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. There are different views on whether L1 or L2 is of primary influence on L3 acquisition in terms of transfer. This study examines differences in the event-related brain potentials (ERP) response to agreement incongruencies between L1 Spanish speakers and L3 Spanish learners, comparing response...

In recent studies by Goad & White (2004, 2006a, in press) the acquisition of articles (the/a) by second language (L2) learners of English have been investigated. They claim that L2 learners from article-less languages such as Turkish and Chinese will have difficulty in prosodically representing articles in spoken production due to first language (L1) prosodic transfer i.e. no prosodic structure...

This paper investigates the speech rhythm of Porteño (Buenos Aires) Spanish (PORTE), which is strongly influenced by Italian due to migration-induced contact, and L2 Peninsular Spanish, produced by Italian natives (SPA L2). It is hypothesized that Italian learners transfer the rhythmic values of their L1 to the target language Spanish and that the data produced by speakers of both the contact v...

We compare the F0 output and chunking size of speech units of L1 English, TW L2 English and L1 Mandarin to see what some of the major intrinsic prosodic difference could be, what prosodic features could account for TW L2 English and in what way prosodic transfer occurs. Results show that the fundamental prosodic difference of the two languages is how in the pitch domain English requires sharper...