Universal Grammar and the Second Language Classroom

This book proposes that research into generative second language acquisition (GenSLA) can be applied to the language classroom. Assuming that Universal Grammar plays a role in second language development, it explores generalisations from GenSLA research. The book aims to build bridges between the fields of generative second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and language teaching; and it shows how GenSLA is poised to engage with researchers of second language learning outside the generative paradigm. Each chapter of Universal Grammar and the Second Language Classroom showcases ways in which GenSLA research can inform language pedagogy.

The Politics of English as a World Language(New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies)

The complex politics of English as a world language provides the backdrop both for linguistic studies of varieties of English around the world and for postcolonial literary criticism. The present volume offers contributions from linguists and literary scholars that explore this common ground in a spirit of open interdisciplinary dialogue.

 

This book investigates the relation between language and logic. Gennaro Chierchia looks at the way syntactic and inferential processes interact in determining polarity sensitive and free choice phenomena. He analyses these as a form of grammaticized scalar implicature and seeks to identify the common core of the polarity system by examining many of its manifestations as well as the choices that determine its diversity. To do so he reassesses the relations between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and in the process makes startling insights into the relation of syntax to logic.

The studies in this collection address a topic that has recently become the focus of considerable interest in second language acquisition (SLA) research: the acquisition of articles. Languages appear to vary in whether they have articles (English, German, Norwegian do, but Chinese, Japanese, Russian do not). Languages that have articles also appear to divide into those that realise definiteness (e.g. English) and those that realise specificity (e.g. Samoan). When speakers of one type of language learn an L2 of a different type, issues of central concern to SLA research arise..

Philosophy of Linguistics

Philosophy of Linguistics investigates the foundational concepts and methods of linguistics, the scientific study of human language. This groundbreaking collection, the most thorough treatment of the philosophy of linguistics ever published, brings together philosophers, scientists and historians to map out both the foundational assumptions set during the second half of the last century and the unfolding shifts in perspective in which more functionalist perspectives are explored.