In second language acquisition, learners often replace foreign and unfamiliar sounds in the second language with the ones available in their first language. These replacements are obviously not random; however, what determines how learners replace foreign sounds? The present study is interested to find out the rules governing these replacements, particularly by analyzing common replacements in five target languages and by comparing the articulatory features between the original foreign sounds and the replacing sounds; and see if the occurrence frequency of the phonemes available in the first language would affect the results of these replacements.

Cheung (1998) identified that Right Dislocation in Cantonese and that in European languages like Italian and English are vastly different. Despite the differences he pointed out, he did not proceed to conclude that what he regarded as the most common type of RD in Cantonese, namely Gap Right Dislocation, is an independent phenomenon. It should be separated with what we commonly refer to as RD, and be analyzed on its own right.

On the other hand, while Cheung regarded Pronominal Right Dislocation to be an equivalent of RD in European languages, I will show that although the two kinds of RD belong to the same phenomenon, Cantonese RD actually has its own specific behaviors, and is not an exact copy of RD in European languages. I will especially compare RD in Italian with that in Cantonese, because of their being pro-drop languages and because Italian RD is more extensively studied.

Huang (1984) proposes that null object is a variable controlled by a null topic, unlike null subject which is a real null pronoun. This paper tries to verify this proposal by investigating the distribution of null object in Cantonese. It is found that while Huang’s proposal is able to explain the majority part of the distribution of null object, it is unable to give an explanation to several cases related to resultativity and indirect object which disallow null object. A possible explanation is given to account for these cases, which is related to feature checking and a modified version of Huang’s Generalized Control Rule.

Excerpt When one gets in touch with a new language, the first thing that catches his attention is probably the alphabet. The German alphabet consists of all the 26 letters from the English alphabet, together with 4 additional letters, namely die Umlaute ä, ö, ü and das scharfes s ß, which only exists in lowercase. […]

Arbores is a small application thus developed for drawing trees in the quickest and easiest way while not trying to include a lot of fancy functions. It utilizes the “TreeView” control already available in Windows, and re-renders the tree in the TreeView to a syntactic tree we are used to. Therefore, you can add, remove or edit the nodes in the TreeView, just like what you do to the files and folders with the “tree” in your Windows Explorer, and an equivalent syntactic tree is drawn on-the-fly.