By its nature, AW [academic writing] represents adversity compared to other types of writing. It owns the characteristics of more notable patterns and language usage compared to other writing styles such as literary works, news, etc. Without discriminating the language used, this kind of writing generally bears similarities across languages due to…

Presents a preliminary study of the use of the Spanish preposition "a" with inanimate direct object nouns (DOs). The properties of such constructions at the lexical, sentence, and discourse levels are described, and the general principles that condition the preposition's appearance are discussed. (21 references) (GLR)

Examines imperatives regarding their different construction forms as well as the syntactic and pragmatic features of the imperative stem that influence the form and meaning of the tag attached to it. The conclusion is drawn that the imperative tag cannot be best analyzed as merely a frozen expression. (GLR)

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

Although the nature of topicalization is complex and cannot be easily separated from considerations of syntactic structure and sentence focus, analysis of language usage has indicated that topicalization is more a stylistic than a syntactic process. Topicalization refers to moving a noun phrase (NP) into the initial position of a sentence.…

Examines the effect of the misuse and over-use of logical connectives in English-as-a-Second-Language undergraduate writing, and suggests that students use a small subset of relatively comprehensible connectives, employ connectives for phrasal expansion, and view logical progression as an integral stage in writing. (Author/CB)

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

Considers the significant divergency of functions of connectives in speech from those of their counterparts in written language and points out that, because learning materials are based mainly on sentence grammars, the former functions are in the main neglected in them. (CB)

Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

Reviews discourse analytic and text comprehension studies for their contributions to a cognitive process view of writing, then reports on a study that combines discourse analysis with online pause data to determine how semantic propositions reflect sentence-level planning patterns. (FL)

Writing research has long sought to identify the internal features of written discourse that help to explain qualitative differences among student texts. Reflecting the theories of the Prague School linguists, this study used a topical structure analysis to distinguish between the sentences and T-units of 48 college freshman essays evaluated as…

A review of research reveals that, although several reading researchers recognize the significance of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence in reading comprehension, little research exists in this area of grammatical interrelationships among sentences. The first step toward an understanding of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence is for…

Sentence combining (SC) has proved to be valuable in increasing the syntactic maturity of students. However, teachers have felt uncomfortable with the arhetorical nature of SC. Little research has been done on the relation of cognitive processes and SC. SC might be more useful if account is taken of the fact that syntax is an abode for cognitive…