A Comparative Study of English Word Order Acquisition by Elementary and Secondary School Pupils - Native Speakers of Serbian and Hungarian

Kitic investigated the phenomenon of English word order acquisition by Serbian and Hungarian speakers, examining both the theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon. She began by looking at language learning and language acquisition, viewing word order acquisition in the context of relevant linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge. The main hypothesis of her empirical investigation was that the majority of word order mistakes in the language production of Serbian and Hungarian speakers of English is due to mother tongue interference. Three supporting hypotheses were introduced to specify the phenomenon of interference in its correlation to (1) language proficiency, (2) sentence patterns, and (3) optional adverbials. The conclusions were based on error analysis of 9280 sentences of 464 elementary and high school learners. The results showed that a learner's level of proficiency seems to be a relevant factor in mother tongue interference as this decreases with increased proficiency. Word order errors are however fossilised at the highest levels. The causes of interference errors, which increase with the number of sentence elements, are either absent sentence patterns or similar ones. In the case of adverbials, word order errors have two forms: interrelation (with canonical elements) and mixed adverbials.

Russian Writers and the Third Section

The Third Section was an instrument not so much of oppression as of information, propaganda and education. Under Nicholas I, the press did not represent public opinion, but rather the official point of view. It was intended to shape public opinion rather than to express it and much of the Third Section's activity focused on creating the best possible contacts with journalists and men of letters. The Third Section supervised literary activities by examining works in print and collecting information through its agents. It rewarded those authors whose work was approved by the emperor, it used writers to pursue its goals, especially in order to "direct minds", but acted as a mediator between the tsar, censors and writers, or sometimes as arbiter in conflicts between writers themselves, and it also acted as a censor. Writers, for their part, served in the Third Section, becoming its agents or consultants, delivering reports to it and writing texts commissioned by the Section. The majority of writers did not see any problems with serving or assisting the Third Section. Ideologies offering an alternative to state monarchism /in professional literature or individual liberalism/ were very weak. The only exception was a small group, mostly composed of eminent and highly educated aristocrats who possessed alternative moral and financial resources. Reitblat showed that the strong ties maintained by some journalists and writers with the Third Section were not unfortunate exceptions due to the low moral qualities of those individuals, but rather a natural phenomenon which reflected the specific nature of the Russian literary system and, more generally, of Russian society as a whole.