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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper

Title:	Morphological Errors in Spanish Second Language Learners and Heritage Speakers
Author:	Silvina A Montrul
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.linguistics.illinois.edu/people/montrul
Institution:	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Linguistic Field:	Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Morphology
Subject Language:	Spanish
Abstract:	Morphological variability and the source of these errors have been intensely debated in SLA. A recurrent finding is that postpuberty second language (L2) learners often omit or use the wrong affix for nominal and verbal inflections in oral production but less so in written tasks. According to the missing surface inflection hypothesis, L2 learners have intact functional projections, but errors stem from problems during production only (a mapping or processing deficit). This article shows that morphological variability is also characteristic of heritage speakers (early bilinguals of ethnic minority languages) who were exposed to the family language naturalistically in early childhood but failed to acquire age-appropriate linguistic competence in the language. However, because errors in heritage speakers are more frequent in written than in oral tasks, the missing surface inflection hypothesis does not apply to them. The discussion considers how morphological errors in the two populations seem to be related to the type of experience.

	This article appears in Studies in Second Language Acquisition Vol. 33, Issue 2, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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