Strengths and weaknesses of generative grammar are examined by an apologist for the traditionalists. Criticism is directed toward difficulties encountered by the layman in comprehending texts on linguistic theories, linguists' use of jargon and pet formulas, and unwieldy amounts of terminology constantly being developed. Special attention is…

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 dissertation is an attempt to characterize the notion "exception to a rule of grammar" within the context of Chomsky's conception of grammar as given in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." This notion depends on a prior notion of "rule government"--in each phrase marker on which a transformational rule may…

This paper considers the way in which a grammar must account for the speaker's knowledge of sentence force as opposed to sentence form or meaning and the way in which this force is related to a sentence. According to the performative analysis approach, the force of each sentence should be stated explicitly as a part of the underlying…

The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according…

Three authors comment upon each other's views as expressed in previous articles on the paragraph. Francis Christensen discusses the "sentence-based" theory and compares it to other descriptions of the paragraph. A.L. Becker compares Christensen's and Paul Rodgers' views and discusses their major differences in (1) identity and variation in…

Designed to provide elementary, secondary, and college English teachers with a basic knowledge of the history and structure of the English language, this book is composed of three sections. Part 1 provides an orientation to linguistics by analyzing the basic principles and the scope of language study, and discussing values and perspectives in the…

This volume of working papers includes seven papers discussing current theory and research in linguistics, phonetics, semantics, and syntax. The following titles are in the collection: "'Do' from 'Occur',""The Syntax of the Verb 'Happen',""Subjects and Agents,""Modal Auxiliaries in Infinitive Clauses in English,""Some Problems in the Description…

This work reports on an initial study of the possibility of providing a suitable framework for the teaching of a foreign language grammar through string analysis, using French as the target language. Analysis of a string word list (word-class sequences) yields an overall view of the grammar. Details are furnished in a set of restrictions which…

Assuming that hypothesized concepts of "case" and "semantic deep structure" reveal insights into the irregularities of cognitive semantic structures underlying the English language, this study attempted to probe the semantic structure of English to provide a foundation for language curriculum materials. Using the case grammar of Charles J.…

This paper suggests that traditional syntax describes a sentence's syntactic structure, and that verb valence theory describes a sentence's semantic structure. According to this theory, a verb has a certain valence, or power to attract a certain number of "adjuncts." It is further shown that a given semantic structure can be converted into…

This paper investigates a type of grammatical ill-formedness in English which is traceable to the repetition, under certain specified conditions, of present participles, e.g. the verb "continue" cannot occur with participles if it is in the present progressive. The solution to generalizing about ill-formedness of this type is by means of a…

This paper seeks to discover the rules active in the formation of tags (intonation tags, declarative tags, and tag questions) in English. The author discusses former analyses of these constructions and presents his own thoughts with many examples, concluding that English has at least two tag formation rules: one that accounts (perhaps…

This paper discusses the nature of two basic semantic distinctions--intensional/extensional, and mental/physical (mental/physical being similar to abstract/concrete but more concrete)--and how an understanding of their interaction is an essential preliminary to writing a semantically motivated grammar of English. (Author/FWB)