Children are extremely gifted in acquiring their native languages, but languages nevertheless change over time. Why does this paradox exist? In this study of creole languages, Enoch Aboh addresses this question, arguing that language acquisition requires contact between differen…
This chapter pulls together 40 years of interlanguage study in terms of three interlinked themes: (1) historic roots, emphasizing ongoing questions/issues that needed interlanguage to be asked; (2) interlanguage as a system in its own right, centering on evidence for the systema…
Making pragmatics accessible to a wide range of students and instructors without dumbing down the content of the field, this text for language professionals: (1) raises awareness and increases knowledge and understanding of how human beings use language in real situations to eng…
"Few works in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) can endure multiple reads, but Selinker's (1972) "Interlanguage" is a clear exception. Written at the inception of the field, this paper delineates a disciplinary scope; asks penetrating questions; advances daring hypo…
The current research is an interlanguage pragmatic study on the use of compliment responses by Lebanese learners of Spanish. Previous to this analysis, a comparative research on compliment responses in peninsular Spanish and Lebanese Colloquial Arabic was conducted. The topics o…
Since the very early emergence of machine-readable corpora into the linguistics scene in the 1960s, the direction of a considerable body of linguistic research began to shift from syntax and phonology, the, by then, focus of linguistic research, to a number of domains that remai…
This study addresses the question of Universal Grammar availability in second language acquisition within the framework of Bley-Vroman's Fundamental Difference Hypothesis, contributing new empirical evidence from learners of Swedish. Johnson and Newport (1989) showed a strong ne…
This study investigated the development of the interlanguage of learners of Arabic as a foreign language from a processability perspective as presented in Pienemann (1998). Pienemann's Processability Theory (PT) procedures were applied to seven syntactic structures of Arabic and…