Päivi Juvonen

Repair in Second-Language Instruction

The present paper deals with the study of repair patterns. Repair, seen as some type of intrinsic trouble manifested by some party during interaction, has here been studied in an institutional setting, the second-language class-room. The repair sequences have been studied relative to the activity type in which the participants are involved. The results show the following: first, that the activity type has an impact on the repair pattern; and secondly, both quantitative and qualitative differences in repair patterns are found when compared with non-educational and foreign-language-teaching settings.

The Lexical Typology of Semantic Shifts

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. ...

Making do with minimal lexica : Light verb constructions with make/do in pidgin lexica

One of the most characteristic features of pidgin languages is the small size of their lexica. Normally, a pidgin makes do with less than 2000 common lexical items. How can one make do with so few ...

Articles, Definite and Indefinite

In a narrow sense, articles can be said to be grammatical elements that, in many languages, encode as their core meaning the identifiability of a referent in a noun phrase. Hence, by using the English definite article the, the speaker implies that the recipient should be able to identify the intended referent, and by using the indefinite article a/an, the speaker implies that this is not necessarily the case. This article discusses the functional and distributional variation found in the languages of the world as regards the use of both definite and indefinite articles.