Purpose: This review article summarizes programmatic research on sentence diversity in toddlers developing language typically and explores developmental patterns of sentence diversity in toddlers at risk for specific language impairment. Method: The first half of this review article presents a sentence-focused approach to language assessment and…

Anaphoric expressions such as repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns serve a major role in the creation and maintenance of discourse coherence. The felicitous use of an anaphoric expression is highly dependent on the discourse salience of the entity introduced by the antecedent. Gordon et al. ("Cogn Sci" 17:311-347, 1993)…

Elicited imitation (EI) has been widely used to examine second language (L2) proficiency and development and was an especially popular method in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, as the field embraced more communicative approaches to both instruction and assessment, the use of EI diminished, and the construct-related validity of EI scores as a…

Argues that Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages exhibit properties that are consistent with the typology of Lehmann and Venneman in which the basic dichotomy is between Object-Verb and Verb-Object languages and that there is no reason to believe that there are fewer exceptionless generalizations to be made about SVO languages than there are about…

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)

Expands on an earlier article that explained how a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions, and introduces a radical alternative that uses the same pragmatic framework but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. (113 references) (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…

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…

The properties of presupposition were investigated in Japanese and English. The investigation examined how the presupposition is preserved under different syntactic structures, and identified presupposition in terms of the transitivity of factive verbs. Japanese was seen as more clearly manifesting "presuppositionability" than English in…

This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to…

Identifies issues specific to syntactic parsing for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI), including applications, types of input errors, characteristics of natural language, and output. Presents a general overview and assessment of grammar formalisms and parsing strategies in relation to ICALI. (Author/LS)

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

This report describes the work of the text analysis groups of the Center for the Study of Reading, whose goals are to investigate the problem of reading comprehension from the standpoint of comparing properties of texts to the difficulty or ease of reading and to construct appropriate theories to account for text properties. The text analysis…

Studies on the acquisition of relative clauses are reviewed. Two polarities among a variety of possible approaches are: Slobin's (1971) study that emphasizes acquisition process and learning strategies, and studies like Sheldon's (1974) that emphasize the linguistic structures involved. Early proposals that children experience more difficulty in…

Intended for preservice and inservice teachers at all educational levels, but especially for those in English education classes, this book examines the foundations of grammar instruction and supplies some definitions and examples of grammar usage. Part one of the book explores relevant language research, reasons for teaching grammar, the…