Drai and Grodzinsky have statistically analyzed a large corpus of data on the comprehension of passives by patients with Broca's aphasia. The data come, according to Drai and Grodzinsky, from binary choice tasks. Among the languages that are analyzed are Dutch and German. Drai and Grodzinsky argue that Dutch and German speaking Broca patients…

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…

Run-on sentences are common mistakes made by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. One type of these errors, with the structure of an expletive subject "there" and a verb "to be" at the beginning of the sentence, is persistent and not easy to detect and correct. This study proposes that this type of error…

Discusses grammar and spelling instruction in The Netherlands for students aged 10-15 and describes an intelligent computer-assisted instructional environment consisting of a linguistic expert system, a didactic module, and a student interface. Three prototypes are described: BOUWSTEEN and COGO for analyzing sentences, and TDTDT for conjugating…

Recent work in language and text has explored such broad functional categories as evidentiality and affect, and has examined their cross-linguistic occurrences and manifestations. This paper focuses on a single construction, explores its variations, and describes and explains its pragmatic and textual functions. This rare construction, exemplified…

We present interpretation-based processing--a theory of sentence processing that builds a syntactic and a semantic representation for a sentence and assigns an interpretation to the sentence as soon as possible. That interpretation can further participate in comprehension and in lexical processing and is vital for relating the sentence to the…

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

The dislocation of sentence elements in spoken French is seen as allowing the speaker to free himself from certain constraints imposed on word order, position of accents, and grammar. Dislocation is described, its various functions are enumerated, and implications for second language instruction are outlined. (MSE)

The article discusses language structures of three hierarchical levels of event descriptions: (1) single-action events (semantic relations, aspectual meaning and lexical verbs or verb phrases, (2) event relations (tense markers, conjunctions, adverbs, perfect tense); (3) event schemas (lexical terms and phrases marking beginnings and endings). A…

Analyzes the "easy to be V" structure in terms of the semantic features of sentences with this structure. These sentences can be classified into types, ranging from the "prototype" with the most features contributing to its transparency, to the "peripheral" with the fewest of such features. (Author/CB)

The language of sportscasting is analyzed in terms of register variation, first by locating the register by successive approximations to a characterization of occasions of use, then by identifying syntactic characteristics: simplification, inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions, and routines. Sports announcer talk is described as a…

Describes rules for the use and interpretation of "verbally determinate ellipsis" involving the English verb group. Discussion covers: verbal determinacy and indeterminacy; verb group vs. verb phrase; the verb group as a five-part system; verb group echoing vs. auxiliary contrasting ellipsis; passive auxiliary; interpretation rules;…

The alternation of Tagalog and English in informal discourse is a feature of the linguistic repertoire of educated, middle- and upper-class Filipinos. This paper describes the linguistic structure and sociolinguistic functions of Tagalog-English code switching (Taglish) as provided by various researchers through the years. It shows that the…

Although a number of word-frequency lists exist in German, there is an absence of studies investigating the relative frequency with which various grammatical structures are used. Traditionally, extended modifiers have been most prevalent in written German. Based on an analysis of authentic radio news broadcasts, this article makes the case that…

Examines the system of relative markers in early African American English as documented in the Ex-Slave Recordings. Found a higher incidence of zero marking in adverbial than in nonadverbial relatives. The lack of "wh"-relatives found, as well as this frequency of zero subject relatives, is interpreted as evidence that African American…