Many K-12 teachers struggle to meet the needs of diverse learners as school reforms promote new disciplinary literacy requirements. In response, language education scholars have argued that teachers must develop "disciplinary linguistic knowledge" (DLK), or an understanding of language in their content area and an ability to design…

A discussion of markedness in English questions the value of markedness theory in constructing explanatory models of linguistic meaning. It challenges the claim that pairs of terms in sentences are in a single type of relation (marked/unmarked) that accounts for all differences between the two terms, including differences in use in measure…

The relationship of the word "only," one of a class of words known as scalar particles, focus adverbs, focus inducers, or focus-sensitive particles, with the "focus" of the sentence is examined. It is suggested, based on analysis of discourse structure, that this "association with focus" is not an inherent property of…

Arguments in favor of a particular decompositional approach to word meaning are presented and contrasted with other theories. The approach in question uses semantic markers to represent word meanings. The semantic marker analysis of English causative verbs is outlined and illustrated, showing how such an analysis could account for the semantic…

The correlation of syntactic form with discourse function has become a central research area in linguistic pragmatics and discourse analysis. Most studies have proceeded on a construction-by-construction basis, failing to note significant generalizations across sentence types. One significant exception identifies a set presuppositional…

The notions of recursiveness and deletion are discussed in the context of Chomsky's presentations of transformational grammar in "Syntactic Structures" and in the later work, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." After consideration of word-recursion, coordinate-clause recursion, and subordinate-clause recursion, extensions to…

The use of a model for treatment of English modals in a machine translation system being developed in Europe is discussed. The Eurotra system, sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities, is designed to translate into the nine official languages of the European Economic Community. The report first examines modality, the different ways…

An analysis of subjacency in Russian focuses on relative clauses, and on the movement of the Russian pronoun "kotoryj." The properties of relativization in English are compared and contrasted with those in Russian, and a theory predating the formulation of bounding theory and the subjacency condition is tested with data from Russian. A…

An analysis of English sentences containing noun phrases (NPs) with extraposed complements argues that the extraposition (EX) is base-generated and not derived by any applications of the Move-alpha principle. A Move-alpha analysis is subject to substantial technical difficulties, and there exist cases of EX for which there is no plausible source…

A model of the child's learning of the past tense forms of English verbs is discussed. This connectionist model takes as input a present-tense verb and provides as output a past tense form. A new simulation is applied to 13 problems raised by critics of the model, presented as fundamental flaws in the conceptualizations underlying connectionism.…

The nature of the Creole-to-English continuum for Guyana is examined with two aims. The first of these is to critically assess the validity of orthodox variationist approaches as applied to similar language situations and the second is to produce the outline of an alternative approach that would work in this and other language situations as well.…

A group of syntactic studies, primarily concerning English and German, within the framework of generalized phrase structure grammar include: "English Adverb Placement in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar" (Belinda L. Brodie), concerning the placement of modal, evaluative, temporal, and verb phrase adverbs; "Syntactic Conditions on Two Types of…

A study investigated the acquisition of the phonemic feature/voice/ and, more specifically, voice onset time (VOT), in Hindi and English. Subjects were 20 monolingual children aged 2 to 6 from each of the 2 language groups, divided into 5 age groups, and 10 adults from each language group. Flash cards depicting minimally contrasting sets of words,…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

The most appropriate vehicle for examining the role of language in producing sex role stereotypes and sexism is Kenneth Burke's concept of the terministic screen, a definition of reality that directs the attention of the audience along a certain line of thought. Thus, once a linguistic term is accepted as reflecting reality, the term influences…