Deaf Learners' Acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two…

This paper proposes a set of hypotheses on the nature of interrogration as a possible language universal. Examples and phrase structure rules and diagrams are given. Examining Tamazight and English, genetically unrelated languages with almost no contact, the author distinguishes two types of interrogation: (1) general, querying acceptability to…

The purpose of this paper is to examine process- and agent-oriented sentences from the point of view of two theories of grammatical description: case grammar after Fillmore and tranformational grammar with modifications introduced by Chomsky. Subject and object functions are reflected in the initial structures of sentence derivation, regardless of…

Three aspects of existential sentences in English and Polish are discussed, and on the basis of the considerations of the logical and structural characteristics of existential sentences, some conclusions are drawn concerning the deep structure and derivation of these sentences. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)

The purpose of this study was to develop a sentence-combining system for teaching composition to seventh grade students. The exercises were designed so as to be independent of the students' previous knowledge of grammar. Chapter 1 examines recent studies in language and writing. The first part of chapter 2 demonstrates that normal growth in…

A corpus of 10,000 sentences extracted from British theatrical texts was used to construct a frequency list of kernel sentence structures. Thirty-one charts illustrate the analyzed results. The procedures used and an interpretation of the frequencies are given. Such lists might aid foreign language teachers in course organization. Available from…

In order to make linguistically significant generalizations in formulating transformational rules, a limited number of variables must be used. Such a limitation rule is the Complex Noun Phrase (NP) Constraint, active in English and, according to claims, universal. The fact that Korean synta, which is greatly different from English, also requires…

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…

This study presents a preliminary analysis of Hungarian complement constructions and the syntactic operations needed to account for them. The expository framework (and the implicit framework of the research itself) is based upon that of Rosenbaum (1967). The aim of the paper is to arrive at a rough picture of the kinds of structures and syntactic…

An examination of the predicates "optional" and "obligatory" is made that suggests that they are far more appropriately viewed as derived rather than primitive notions, whose appropriate attributions follow in all cases from independent linguistic facts and principles of a much more general and more generally significant character. (Author/HP)

Discusses certain unknown constraints" active in the use of specific quantifiers in English. (VM)

This is a contrastive analysis of British English, American English and Hungarian sentence prosody. The first part is an introduction stating the study's objective, scope and data, and briefly surveying the related literature. It outlines the study's view of prosodic features and its principles of comparison and prediction. Part Two inventories…

The volume of working papers includes eight papers describing current theory and research in linguistics and in semantics and syntax. The following articles are in the collection: "The Grammar of Emotive and Exclamatory Sentences in English,""Linguistics as Chemistry: The Substance Theory of Semantic Primes,""On Perceptual and Grammatical…

A CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY OF CERTAIN TYPES OF SENTENCE EMBEDDING IN ENGLISH IS THE DELETION OF THE INITIAL NOUN PHRASE OF THE EMBEDDED SENTENCE WHEN THE NOUN PHRASE IS IDENTICAL TO SOME NOUN PHRASE IN THE MAIN SENTENCE. EXAMPLES OF THIS PHENOMENON ARE SENTENCES LIKE "JOHN CONDESCENDED TO GO" AND "JOHN DEFIED BILL TO GO."…