Organic Vegetable Cultivation

Present day agricultural practices are posing a serious threat to the human population due to unscrupulous use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Conventional agricultural practices wherein large quantities and unscrupulous use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are no longer safer as it directly enter the food chain. Hence, organic cultivation of vegetables is gaining momentum among the growing population. Organic practices rely on crop rotations, crop residues, plant and animal manures, growing of legume and green manure crops and biological control of pests and diseases. It aims to combine tradition, innovation and science in a balanced proportion to utilize the environment in safer manner and maintain ecological balance. Organic cultivation assures protection of the environment and plays a major role on the economy of a nation. Sustainable production of organic vegetables needs to be ensured to fetch premium price in the domestic as well as international markets. Organic farming has shown expansion in the recent years in the European countries offering scope for a better price in the international market

Relative gradable adjective recursion such as small small big mushrooms is more challenging for children than possessive recursion such as the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms

Our experiment investigates whether children handle recursive possessives (R-Poss) in a more adult-like manner than recursive relative gradable adjectives (R-RGA). While the abstract notion of indirect recursion underlies both categories, we ask whether individual syntactic-semantic properties determine different acquisition paths in English for R-Poss and R-RGA at the 2-Level (the deer’s friend’s mushrooms, small big mushrooms) and at the 3-Level (the deer’s friend’s sister’s mushrooms, small small big mushrooms). The results indicate that older children perform better than younger children on 2- and 3-Level R-Poss. However, this trend is not observed for R-RGA where both age groups perform similarly, successfully handling 2- but not 3-Level R-RGA. Analysis of individual results reveal that children who are successful with comprehension and production at 3-Level R-RGA are also successful with 3-Level R-Poss, but not the other way around. We conclude that 3-Level R-RGA is more challenging than 3-Level R-Poss, arguing that this difficulty arises from R-RGA syntax-semantics which involves a set-subset relation and gradability relative to comparative scales

Accessibility to universal grammar in child second language acquisition.

The present study examines the evidence for accessibility to Universal Grammar (UG) in the interlanguage of four children (two Spanish speakers, a Japanese speaker, and a French speaker) acquiring English as a second language. Specifically, the study investigates whether these child second language (L2) learners had access to a posited principle of UG, the Morphological Uniformity Principle (MUP) proposed by Jaeggli and Safir (1987). The MUP provides a unified linguistic account of apparently disparate language facts--null subjects and verb inflections. The MUP states that null subjects are licensed only in languages which have uniform verb paradigms that is, either all the forms or none of the forms are inflected. Examples of such languages are Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. Languages such as English and French, which have non-uniform verb paradigms (i.e. irregular inflections), do not license null subjects. Certain precise and testable claims for language development are implied by the MUP. Specifically, the MUP predicts that null subjects should occur only in those child grammars which have morphologically uniform verb paradigms but not in those which have morphologically non-uniform verb paradigms. Hyams (1986, 1987) and Guilfoyle (1984) among others, have claimed that the null subject phenomenon is a universal property of child language. The present research tested Hyams' and Jaeggli's predictions in the ILs of the four child subjects. The findings do not indicate any strong evidence for child L2 learners' accessibility to the MUP. The claims for a Universal status for the MUP are thus questioned. It is argued that alternative explanations based on a combination of perceptual factors and the nature of the L1 can account for the occurrence and non-occurrence of null subjects in the IL of the three subjects who did not support Hyams and Jaeggli's claims. Individual variation, arising from three major factors, would also partially explain the differences observed in the IL of the four subjects. The findings of the study have several implications for L2 learners' accessibility to UG. A major implication relates to the problems involved in successfully addressing the question of access to UG in the L2. Possible lines of investigation, which are intended to overcome these problems, are proposed for future SLA research. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162482/1/9013950.pd

Languages: An International Multidisciplinary Open Access Journal

Languages are an integral part of everyday life; they define our interactions with other people as well as the physical and mental spaces we inhabit over time. Since ancient times, languages have fascinated humans. [...