Stig Eliasson

What Causes Avoidance in L2 Learning: L1-L2 difference, L1-L2 Similarity, or L2 Complexity?.

Among the structural and lexical factors claimed to account for avoidance in second language learning are (a) cross-linguistic difference, (b) cross-linguistic similarity, and (c) intrinsic complexity of the second language features avoided. This paper examines patterns of avoidance and preference for phrasal verbs or equivalent single-word verbs among Swedish learners of English. We assumed that if the subjects avoided English phrasal verbs, particularly the figurative ones, even though phrasal verbs exist in Swedish, this would indicate that inherent semantic difficulty of second language forms was the main factor contributing to the avoidance behavior. If, on the other hand, the learners did not show any preference for one-word verb forms in English, or indeed favored the phrasal forms, this would support the assumption that avoidance or nonavoidance depends largely on differences or similarities between the native and the foreign language.A multiple-choice test and a translation test were given to two groups of advanced Swedish-speaking learners of English. Each test consisted of 20 sentences, allowing for the choice of either a phrasal or a synonymous single-word verb. The test answers showed that the Swedish learners avoided neither phrasal verbs in general nor the figurative ones in particular, regardless of whether the verbs were similar to, or different from, their Swedish translation equivalents. Furthermore, the results were compared to the avoidance patterns of a group of advanced Hebrew-speaking learners of English. From the comparison it emerged that the Swedish learners usedsignificantly more phrasal verbs than the Israelis, notably figurative ones. These results suggest that the avoidance is determined more by a systemic incongruence between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) than by the inherent difficulty of L2 forms.

Language and its ecology : essays in memory of Einar Haugen

Retracing the first seven years of bilingual and metalinguistic development through the comments of bilingual child, Michael Clyne Tough movement and its analogs in Germanic languages, Bernard Comrie Mother tongue - for better or worse? Florian Coulmas A convergence-resistant feature in an convergence-prone setting - the east Sutherland gaelic vocative case, Nancy C. Dorian Contributions from the acquisition of Polish phonology and morphology to theoretical linguistics, Wolfgang U. Dresler, Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk The struggle to maintain Croatian dialects in the U.S., Rudolf Filipovic Predictors and criteria in multisite census survey research - from Einar Haugen to today, Joshua A. Fishman Progressive periphrases, markedness and second language data, Anna Giacalone Ramat Managing intergroup communication - lifespan issues and consequences, Howard Giles, Jake Harwood Frontier Norwegian in south Dakota - the situated poetics of Halvor O. Aune, Dell Hymes Verbal prefixation in the Ugric languages from a typological-areal perspective, Ferenc Kiefer Cross-linguistic comparison of prosodic patterns in Finnish, Finland Swedish, Stockholm Swedish, Ilse Lehiste Exploring the social constraints on language change, Lesley Milroy Alternatives to the sonority hierarchy for explaining segmental sequential constraints, John J. Ohala, Haruko Kawasaki-Fukumori Pragmatic and semiotic agreement, behaviourment-switching and communicative awareness - on concepts of the analysis of bilingual behaviour, Els Oksaar Notes on the dwarfs in Germanic tradition, Edgar C. Polome Family values - the evidence from folk linguistics, Dennis R. Preston, Nancy Niedzielski The British heresy in ESL revisited, Suzanne Romaine Politics and language change - the sociolinguistic reflexes of the division of a Palestinian village, Bernard Spolsky, Muhammad Amara On mechanisms of interference, Sarah G. Thomason Atlantiker in nord-westeuropa - Pitken und Vanen, Theo Vennemann A lone loanword and its implications, Werner Winter.

Stress Alternations and Vowel Length: New Evidence for an Underlying Nine-Vowel System in Swedish

This paper presents new empirical evidence for a process description of quantity in Swedish. Like most other Germanic languages, Swedish possesses a rich array of stress-governing derivational suffixes which cause stress and length alternations in the stems to which they are attached. Such alternations bear crucially on the choice between a unit-oriented or process-oriented approach to Swedish phonology. Inasmuch as 18-vowel-phoneme solutions presuppose lexically inherent vocalic length, they result in a multitude of morphophonemic alternations between long and short vowels. In process solutions, such quantitative alternations follow predictably from independently motivated rules. These results have important implications for the description of the phonemic system, phonotactics, rule component, and morphological structure of the language. The conclusions are directly valid also for Norwegian.

The Interrelations between Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

“Concern about the definition of applied linguistics has become a remarkable feature of professional gatherings,” observes a contributor to Kaplan’s collection On the Scope of Applied Linguistics (Palmer 1980:21).1 This preoccupation with definition is something applied linguistics shares with many new branches of scientific inquiry, both within and outside linguistics. To cite just one other example, a lively debate continues to flourish on how to delimit and characterize the field of pragmatics (e.g., Levinson 1983:5–35). Applied linguistics being on one account merely three decades old (Corder 1973:11) and yet already widely diversified, it is no wonder if its practitioners should feel compelled to try to determine its true identity. Part of the problem of defining applied linguistics is to explain how it relates to linguistic theory, but, more generally, there is a need to ascertain how it ties in with and differs from all non-applied pursuits in the study of language. Any serious attempt at understanding what applied linguistics is will thus force us to scrutinize the latent organizational principles that underlie linguistic science as a whole.

A Bibliography of Swedish Contrastive Linguistics and Error Analysis

Systematic contrastive analysis (CA) and error analysis (EA) of Swedish are just a little more than a decade old, but have rapidly grown into a flourishing field of study. However, the contributions to this area of research are scattered over numerous and often rather diverse publications, and a compilation of the relevant literature should therefore be useful to researchers in the field as well as textbook writers and teachers who seek to apply the results of Swedish CA and EA in instructional materials and class-rooms.