Many sentences of modal discourse are "inconstant": "Paris Hilton could have been a politician", for example, seems to be true in some contexts, false in others. In this dissertation, I explore this topic, which we can call the "inconstancy of de re modal attributions". My goal is to develop, motivate, and defend a…

The research demonstrated that there are differences in the processing of sentences containing anaphoric pronouns (e.g., "After Mark arrived, he used the phone.") and cataphoric pronouns (e.g., "After he arrived, Mark used the phone."). Reading time was measured on sentences containing 2 clauses; a pronoun appeared in 1 clause, and a proper name…

Examines the traditionally prestigious status of the sentence in grammatical analysis, and traces the history of the word "phrase" as a part of French grammatical language. (AM)

Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

This paper aims to account for what at first appears to be a unique constraint in the formation of A-not-A questions. Most previous analyses employ the pragmatic notion of focus. This paper argues in favor of a presuppositional account, which has wide empirical coverage and is independently motivated and more theoretically coherent than the notion…

A study of discourse anaphora, anaphora in discourse that is not controlled syntactically, looks at the three types of such anaphora in Chinese: pronominal, nominal, and zero. The analysis focuses on the type of coreference in which the antecedent and the anaphor occur in clauses that occur adjacent to each other in linear order. In such clauses,…

Three linguistic features used in spontaneous conversation to express emotional involvement (this, never, and all) are analyzed. "All" and "never" have referential functions; "this" has both referential and deictic functions. The focus of this analysis is on the way that speakers use these features to express emotional involvement and to orient…

There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

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…

Special issue devoted to the study of generative grammar in German-speaking countries. (VM)

Discusses the referential meanings of nouns within discourse with emphasis on their anaphoric role from one phrase to another. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The nature of the system of linguistic entities of a natural language is examined. The purpose is to define the relation between "le lexique" and an overall linguistic theory, the relation between form and meaning. (Text is in French.) (TL)

This collection contains five papers on discourse in a variety of languages. "A Stratificational Perspective on the Discourse Structure of Limos Kalinga" by Hartmut Wiens demonstrates the value of the stratificational model in looking at language in relatively small portions at various levels while also showing how its structural aspects…

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

This paper is concerned with the semantic, rather than the syntactic, nature of non-restrictive relativization, and its implications. (CK)