Analysis of over 5,000 tokens of modals in written representations of spoken American English since 1824 shows that there have been significant changes, in terms of both the modals used and the functions of modal expressions. Around the time of the Civil War, the modals must, should, may, and shall dropped drastically in frequency, and at the same time other modals, got to, have to, ought, better, can, and gonna, sharply increased in frequency. The "old" and "new" modals overlap in some general functions, representing obligation, possibility, and future tense. However, within these general functions, the "old" and "new" modals have been characteristically used for different specific types of functions: the "old" modals had usages associated with hierarchical social relationships, with people controlling the actions of other people, and with absolute judgments based upon social decorum, principle, and rules about societal expectations of certain types of people. The "new" modals, on the other hand, are more personal, being used to, for example, give advice to an equal, make an emotional request, offer help, or criticize one's interlocutor. The functional similarity of the various older modal functions as opposed to that of the newer modal functions suggests that the various changes noted all represent different aspects of a single change in the fundamental semantic parameters of the language.

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This paper reports the findings of a study of the acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portuguese by first and second year students of these languages with English as their first language. Various structures were tested with the aim of separating the features of interlanguage which may be attributed to first language interference from those which may be explained as being universal to second language acquisition. Among these structures were use of resumptive pronouns in the relative clause, deletion of relativizers, stranding of prepositions, deletion of prepositions, and piedpiping structures. In line with the work of Gass and Ard (1980) and Hyltenstam (1981), the present paper examines the explanatory value of the accessibility hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977) as applied to the ease or difficulty of the acquisition of relativization of various syntactic types, and expands this study by including data from the acquisition of relative clause types not examined in previous works. Also tested were structures involving different strategies for the parsing and recognition of relative clauses, in order to determine which are employed most frequently and most successfully by second language learners, and structures with correct and incorrect deletion of prepositions, in order to see whether the loss of information involved would be a constraining factor.