This dissertation is a typological study of verb-final languages, the purpose of which is to examine various grammatical phenomena in verb-final languages to discover whether there are correlations between the final position of the verb and other aspects of grammar. It examines how finality of the verb interacts with argument coding in simple…

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…

Reviews the evolution of semicolon use in English, examining the frequency of semicolons, colons, and dashes in grammar, language, and linguistic books from the mid-16th century to the present. Concludes that after flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, the semicolon may have become a marginal component of the English punctuation system. (42…

The descriptive contents (cognitive meanings) of the modals "can,""may,""could,""might,""must,""need,""ought,""should," compared with paraphrastic verbs and adjectives, motivate two cross-classifying dimensions: logical modality (possibility, impossibility, necessity)…

This contrastive grammar based on modern linguistic theory considers noun and verb phrases as the primary morphological and syntactical structure of language. A section on the noun phrase examines: (1) types of noun phrase constructions; (2) gender and number; (3) elements, expansion, and substitutes of the noun phrase. The material on the verb…

This study, contrasting grammatical structures in English and Hungarian, considers those areas of grammar in the two languages which would cause the greatest interference for the native English speaker learning Hungarian. The choice of topics is based on the author's personal observation, both of English speakers learning Hungarian and of…

This study examines the ten major contemporary standard Slavic languages (Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Bielorussian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian) from the point of view of their similarities and differences in morpho-syntactic structure. Areas examined include: vowel and consonant systems, morphophonemics,…

This paper studies the variety of Arabic imperative sentences, which are seen as the result of an interrelated set of choices made from a limited number of binary systems, and analyzes their occurrence in different situations. Where possible, relevant features of Arabic imperative structures are compared with their nearest English equivalents. The…

This book discusses the relevance of applied linguistics to foreign language teaching and supports the point of view that linguistics is relevant as the source of assumptions rather than as the source of conclusions. In foreign language teaching, the assumptions based on linguistics must ultimately be evaluated on their ability to explain the…

A special word, "naynaa," which occurs in the Jamul dialect of Diegueno, a Yuman language spoken in the San Diego, California, area is described. Jamul has subject-object-verb word order, and its major word classes are noun and verb. Lexical pronouns are not required. Clauses may be connected by means of switch reference marking, and/or…

A discussion of pragmatics looks at and compares a variety of statement types in Macedonian and French. Based on the assumption that the most important semantic and syntactic elements are presented by the speakers themselves as well as by the temporal and spatial markers, the function of the statement form is examined. Focus is on the use of the…

Points out that "pro"-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of "pro" not found with the overt pronomials of non-"pro"-drop languages. Notes that while the overt pronouns of non-"pro"-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, "pro" may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. (24 references) (Author/CK)

Compared two Arabic stories and their English translations and two Arabic and English stories with reference to sentence organization, coordination, and subordination. Showed that Arabic and English sentences are differently organized, coordination is more common in Arabic than in English, while subordination is more frequent in English than in…