The author raises the question of how to relate modern transformational grammars to a body of empirical fact, and suggests why paraphrasing might legitimately be considered a feature of behavior relevant to linguistic competence. This study is introduced by a discussion of the empirical basis of descriptive linguistics, followed by sections…

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…

The meanings of the words grammar and linguistics have undergone a multitude of changes in the last years, but teachers should continue to teach linguistics and formal grammar in the schools. (JH)

After an extensive transformational consideration of the shift of indirect objects with "to" and "for," the authors introduce a theory of perceptual strategy which could be used to supplement transformational theory. According to a concept of perceptual strategy constraints on susceptibility, the strategy for interpreting a sentence involves…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…

This report presents some of the findings of several years research on the relations between the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas (NNE) and standard English (SE). The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary "be" in NNE. The approach to the problem combines the methods of…