This book presents an analysis of the difficulties faced by native speakers of English in the learning of Romance languages and in so doing proposes a comprehensive model of the acquisition of tense-aspect marking. While L1 speakers of English may quickly learn to identify and, to some extent, use the Spanish perfective and imperfective verb endings, the L2 representation of tense-aspect distinctions among both beginning and advanced learners requires a comprehensive multidimensional analysis.

The study of native language influence in Second Language Acquisition has undergone significant changes over the past few decades. This book, which includes 12 chapters by distinguished researchers in the field of second language acquisition, traces the conceptual history of language transfer from its early role within a Contrastive Analysis framework to its current position within Universal Grammar.

A comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the analysis of public rhetoric, Modern Rhetorical Criticism teaches readers how to examine and interpret rhetorical situations, ideas, arguments, structure, and style. The text covers a wide range of critical techniques, from cultural and dramatistic analysis to feminist and Marxist approaches. A wealth of original criticism demonstrates how to analyze such diverse forms as junk mail, congressional debates, and traffic regulations, as well as literature. This long-awaited revision contains new coverage of mass media, feminist criticism, and European criticism.

Deconstructing the English Passive presents an analysis of the form and function of the passive construction in English. The book examines the structural ingredients of the passive and emphasizes the notion of an implicit argument, which sets the passive apart from other constructions with non-agentive subjects. The theoretical analysis is supported with corpus data, including a case study of the passive in academic writing.

This work arose from the desire to teach foreign students in North America a particular variety of language used in their disciplines (speech situations), whereupon the inadequacy or non-existence of previous study became apparent. Given this raison d'être, the work first illustrates one approach to the analysis of language in order to test whether something of significance can be said about the typology of texts and discourse.