Evidence from a sample of informal written language (personal correspondence) shows that the most important constraints on pronoun usage in subject position are discourse-based. The quantitative analysis supports the hypothesis that pronoun usage is "functional" since semantically relevant information is preserved in surface structure.…

Looks at infinitival relative clauses, such as "Mary is the person to ask," and their distribution in spoken English. Analyzes the correlation between the function of the antecedent in the relative clause and the function of the whole postmodified noun phrase in the matrix clause. (Author/JL)

A multidimensional approach analyzes the linguistic characteristics of 26 Somali spoken and written registers. Somali represents a different language type, and no single dimension adequately describes the relations among registers. Findings are related to previous analyses of English, Tuvaluan, and Korean. (27 references) (Author/LB)