Chiung-chih Huang
Tunghai University

In second language acquisition studies, it has been observed that learners' use of verb morphology is influenced by inherent lexical aspect. The purpose of this study is to go beyond inherent lexical aspect and investigate how the aspectual distinction between 'unitary' and 'repeated' situation types (Smith, 1997) influences learners' and native speakers' use of verb morphology. The data of this study consist of audio-taped interviews of eight subjects: three native English speakers, and five learners whose native language is Mandarin Chinese. The results reveal that in relation to inherent lexical aspect, both learners and native speakers demonstrate similar skewed distributions of verb morphology in their speech. However, in relation to unitary vs. repeatedsituation types, learners and native speakers demonstrate different patterns in their use of progressive morphology: Native speakers tend to use progressive morphology for describing repeated situations, while learners use it to describe the ongoing, continuous nature of unitary situations. The findings suggest that learners' acquisitional patterns may not be determined exclusively by native input. The prototype account proposed by Shirai & Andersen (1995) provides a feasible explanation for the findings of this study.

Graham H. Turner
Department of Education & Social Science,
University of Central Lancashire, UK

In the present paper, I wish to put under the microscope the very impulse to raise, even as a possible matter of concern, the issue of linguistic shift in a signed language under the influence of a spoken language. The view that changing patterns within signed languages are unwelcome is not new, but its articulation has to date been largely on aesthetic and intuitive grounds. Back in 1904, Dr James L. Smith issued a warning in such terms to Deaf people at the seventh convention of the US National Association of the Deaf: "The enemies of sign language are not confined to those who decry it and call for its abolition entirely. Its most dangerous enemies are in the camp of its friends, in the persons of those who maltreat it and abuse it by misuse. The sign language, properly used, is a language of grace, beauty, power. But through careless or ignorant use it may become ungraceful, repulsive, difficult to comprehend" (cited by Gannon, 1981, p. 363). This may not be the limit of the grounds for concern. The question, then, is this: Languages change--so what? The corollary: Can the result of change ever legitimately influence the first answer?

Euen Hyuk (Sarah) Jung
Georgetown University

This paper presents an analysis of the repair mechanism in second language classroom talk. More specifically, the current paper focuses on how co-participants (i.e., the teacher and the learners) carry out repair operations on the trouble source produced by the learner in the second language instructed talk-in-interaction. The present findings show that participation frameworks (i.e., types of activities) play an important role in constructing repair sequences in the instructional context. When learners engage in role-playing activities with one another, a wide variety of repair sequences are manifested, such as self-initiated and self-completed, self-initiated and other-completed, and other-initiated and other-completed repair sequences. The collaborative nature of repair sequences is also manifested in learner role-playing activities, in which self-initiation of the trouble source by the learner is collaboratively completed with co-participants in the form of word search and try-marking. Other-initiated and other-completed repair in learner role-playing activities is manifested in the form of cluing, which is accompanied by the sequence of teacher's initiation, learner's response, and teacher's evaluation (i.e., IRE sequence). Teacher-fronted activities, on the other hand, in which a teacher asks a question to learner(s), are mainly characterized by other-initiated and other-completed repair structures in the form of IRE sequence and unmodulated "no." Furthermore, a close examination of learners' responses to the teacher's repair (e.g., recast) reveals the key role of activity types operating in L2 instructional discourse.