Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Analysis of the deep structure of certain Tagalog sentences reveals buried agents. In Tagalog, verbs are inflected for the case role of the subject Noun Phrase (NP). However, Tagalog contains many sentences which, on the surface, do not appear to adhere to this rule, because they are missing the agent. Among sentences which deviate from the rule…

Expands and develops the theory of "ser" and "estar" with predicate adjectives which was first presented in "Hispania" in May 1983. This theory holds that the selection of "ser" or "estar" in constructions with predicate adjectives expresses different types of implied comparisons. (SED)

The constraints in English on the definiteness, specificity, humaness and animacy of noun phrases (NP's) undergoing passive and dative movement are examined. Evidence presented shows that these constraints occur in other languages in marked and unmarked constructions as absolute constraints on acceptability or as tendencies. This suggests a…

Arguments for the introduction of an adverbial node label (ADV) in transformational grammar are examined and rejected. The following question is raised: Is a node label ADV necessary, or can the phenomena associated with adverbials be explained in terms of the set of node labels used to explain other areas of grammar? The author argues that a new…

Compares two analyses of a verb phrase deletion in a particular English sentence with a third analysis and shows that the analysis that takes the word "would" in the sentence as a proform has significant advantages over the analysis that posits a deletion site after "would." (SED)

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

Argues that the explanation of the use of "ser" and "estar" with locatives presented in the March 1984 issue of "Hispania" derives so directly from a theory of universal grammar because it is indicative of the explanatory adequacy of Case Grammar or of other, comparable theories of the deeper levels of linguistic structure. (SED)

This study investigates whether other relationships in sentence structure besides the "brother-in-law" relation sanction surrogate agreement in Zinacanteco Tzotzil (Mayan). Surrogate agreement refers to cases in which an element that lies outside the class of regular agreement controllers in a language (the surrogate) controls…

It was found that those who read English as a second language (ESL), like L1 individuals, use their knowledge of the world and contribute to information found in the text. However, ESL readers' contributions to the text may be marred by language interference, lack of background knowledge, faulty inferencing, and certain data- and…

In early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky (1968, 1972) came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presuppostion and scope of quantifiers, must be…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of coordination reduction in various languages and to propose a universal set of rules that will account for all types of coordination reduction. In a brief discussion of some of the more recent proposals on coordination reduction it will be shown that these proposals fail to account for the…

Based on the assumptions that a universal grammar has a number of functional parameters and that in each language, some are not activated, a study was undertaken to investigate two hypotheses. They are (1) that in a grammatical situation where an adult's first language parameter is not activated in the second language, the learner will "lose" the…