LINGUIST List 14.3361

Fri Dec 5 2003

Qs: Control Structures; Cross-ling Speaking Rates

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Rocio Perez, second language acquisition of control structures
2. Julio Santiago, speaking rate across languages

I am writing my PhD dissertation on control structures. I am
particularly interested in the debate regarding the semantic
(Culicover and Jackendoff) vs. the syntactic(Hornstein) accounts. I
would like to investigate whether L2 acquisition data can contribute
toward ending the debate, but my problem is that so far I have had
very little luck finding references regarding studies of L2
acquisition of control structures(complements and/or adjuncts). Could
anybody please suggest any past or current studies? Have any L2
acquisition studies addressed this topic with regard to control
structures? I am specially interested in English and/or Spanish, but
L2 acquisition studies of control structures in any language will do
nicely. I will be posting a summary of the answers.

Subject-Language: English;Spanish; Code: SPN 
Language-Family: Indo-European; Code: IE 

Dear linguists:

I am working on cross-linguistic differences in language production,
mainly those between germanic languages (English, Dutch, German) and
Romanic languages (Spanish, French). Does anybody know of any evidence
regarding differences in speaking rate between English and Spanish?

Of course, speaking can be measured in number of words, syllables and
phonemes per time unit (among other choices). The most interesting
measure for me would be number of syllables per time unit, but I will
welcome ideas of any kind, as the literature on this question seems to
be very limited.

I will post a summary to the list. Thank you all very much.

Julio 

Language-Family: Indo-European; Code: IE