This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…

The purposes of this study were to identify the best predictor or predictors of paragraph comprehensibility and to attempt to interpret that predictor as a skill. Forty-two passages of differing readability (ranging from grade 2.5 to 10.0) were analyzed for within word, within sentence, and between sentence characteristics. The measures used for…

The aim of this paper is to account for some semantic properties of Romanian interrogatives "ce" and "cine" by establishing some definite correlations between various contextual restrictions governing the use of these interrogative particles and the "meaning" which might be assigned to each of these particles in any…

Previous accounts of "generic" have been either too broad in including several sentence types as generic, or too narrow in limiting the definition of generic to the noun or verb alone. This research critically examines data and previous treatments of the generic verb, generic noun, and generic sentence. Because every generic sentence may…

This paper attempts to characterize some of the knowledge that people have of their language's semantic structure, in order to determine what a computer has to know to perform the operations of searching for facts and answering questions. Necessarily, this sort of semantic analysis is done in connection with syntactic structure. The meaningful…

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…

The paper proposes, on the basis of a study of relative clauses and WH-interrogative constructions, to reflect the time-oriented character of the sentence by replacing neutral expressions like "#" with explicit time references like "beginning" and "end." These boundaries are to be universally associated with all…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

A total of 19 good and 19 poor readers participated in an examination of the extent to which first grade children who were successful beginning readers would exhibit better syntactic skills in auditory and reading tasks than would less successful readers. To isolate differences specifically related to sentence processing skills, the two groups…

A review of the literature and an examination of the state of the technology is presented in this discussion of text analysis with computers. The computer capabilities of several available text analysis programs are reviewed, including those that examine vocabulary, word strings, sentence and syntactic complexity, and readability. (AEA)

A situation of linguistic contact often produces various degrees of change in at least one of the languages involved. It is shown that the syntactic, as well as the phonological and the lexical, components are the locus of interference from one language on the other. Features of interference are described as part of a systematic pattern build on a…

The complete texts of 250 trade books for children in the primary grades were analyzed by computer in order to identify recurring two- and three-word strings. Of the 202,763-word sample that resulted, 89 two-word strings occurred 100 times or more, and only two three-word strings occurred more than 100 times. These frequencies represent,…

An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…