the benefits of textual input enhancement in the acquisition of linguistic forms have produced mixed results in sla literature. the present study investigates the effects of textual enhancement on adult foreign language intake of two english linguistic forms-subjunctive mood and inversion structures-to explore the role of the type of linguistic items in input enhancement studies. it also invest...

Many native English speakers (myself included), when first studying a Romance language, are quite surprised and confused by the sheer diversity of inflectional endings that Romance verbs display. While the richer morphological distinctions between different gender and number combinations is not entirely unfathomable due to the somewhat similar distinctions in forms of “be”, particularly fascina...

BACKGROUND We report the results of two experiments that examine the mental representations underlying the comprehension and reasoning stages of negative exceptive conditionals requiring the subjunctive ('B a menos que A' and 'B a no ser que A' = 'B unless A') and the indicative mood ('B excepto si A' and 'B salvo si A' = 'B except if A'). METHOD A truth table task was employed to infer the m...

the benefits of textual input enhancement in the acquisition of linguistic forms have produced mixed results in sla literature. the present study investigates the effects of textual enhancement on adult foreign language intake of two english linguistic forms-subjunctive mood and inversion structures-to explore the role of the type of linguistic items in input enhancement studies. it also invest...

In this section we consider the distribution of the subjunctive and the indicative moods in English complement clauses and argue that the observed patterns can mostly be explained on semantic grounds. Traditional grammarians have long noticed that the opposition between the indicative and the subjunctive mood is semantic, each grammatical form being suitable in a coherent class of contexts. For...

The study of grammatical mood has a long tradition in philology and linguistic semantics. Typologically, we find morphological distinctions such as indicative, subjunctive, optative, imperative. Focussing on the subjunctive versus indicative contrast, traditional grammars typically identify the indicative with realis and the subjunctive with irrealis, and describe the contrast in terms of selec...

This paper develops an account of mood selection with attitude predicates in French. I start by examining the “contextual commitment” account of mood developed by Paul Portner and Aynat Rubinstein (P&R). I raise empirical and theoretical challenges for P&R’s analysis of contextual commitment and its role in P&R’s explanations of mood selection. There are indicativeselecting verbs that are felic...

Previous research has shown that the Spanish subjunctive is a vulnerable mood in the process of acquisition for adult heritage speakers. Specifically, the subjunctive use in optional contexts tends to be more prone to simplification (i.e. in adjectival clauses). This subjunctive emerges in monolingual Spanish-speaking children as early as two years of age and reaches more adultlike development ...

One of the main problems that affects the quality of machine translation is how to express the knowledge of language in precision. Subjunctive mood is a very common language phenomenon in English. From the perspective of E-C machine translation, and based on the theory of Semantic Element (SE) in Unified Linguistics, the paper discusses the specific formalization methods for each type of the En...

Counterfactual conditionals are frequently used in language to express potentially valid reasoning from factually false suppositions. Counterfactuals provide two pieces of information: their literal meaning expresses a suppositional dependency between an antecedent (If the dice had been rigged…) and a consequent (… then the game would have been unfair). Their second, backgrounded meaning refers...