Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and…

This paper gives a contrastive analysis of noun phrases in English and Chinese. The syntactic features of the structures, the devices used to mark distinctions in number, case and gender, as well as the similarities and differences between English and Chinese relative clauses are discussed. Partly due to the documented differences between these…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

Past perceptions of the role of grammar in the second language syllabus have been limited by the attitude that grammatical content should be addressed directly in the language classroom and that it is limited to language items and rules with definable boundaries. However, language has properties crucial to its use for communication that are not…

The application of communicative and grammatical approaches to syllabus design for conversational English for specific purposes is discussed. Each approach is examined, and applications are suggested for each at different stages of instruction, based on learner readiness and the linguistic organization of the target language variety. At the early…