IN THIS SECOND VOLUME (CHAPTER V) OF A THREE-PART SERIES ON HAUSA SYNTAX, THE EMPHASIS IS ON THE FUNCTION RATHER THAN THE FORM OF WORDS. (THE FIRST VOLUME DISCUSSES SYNTAX AND THE THIRD DEALS WITH SPECIFIC TEXTS.) IN ADDITION TO THOROUGH TREATMENT OF THE PARTICULAR HAUSA FUNCTION WORDS, A SMALL GROUP OF WORDS WITH FREQUENT OCCURRENCE AND HIGHLY…

This article discusses prepositive expressions, expressions whose meaning is equivalent to that of one single preposition, and preposition groups in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The purpose of the study was to investigate children's understanding of "before" and "after" in temporal directions, in temporal questions, and in pictorial events through the use of three interview methods. The subjects for the study were 62 children, ranging in age from 40 to 80 months, enrolled in a half-day, private nursery/kindergarten…

The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…

The "direct discourse analysis" introduced by Susumu Kuno is examined and found to be inadequate. To account for the data Kuno discusses, as well as for related data, a new approach to transformations is suggested. By determining the function, rather than the form, of a transformation, certain predictions are possible. Primary is the…

This textbook of Modern English combines a diachronic and synchronic approach to present a study of English syntax. The book attaches great importance to precise definitions of the various parts of speech and of their grammatical function, and provides a large number of idiomatic examples to illustrate rules and uses. Historical background is…

This pedagogical approach to transformational grammar describes those aspects of the subject which have the greatest relevance for teachers of English. Following a definition of basic terms and a discussion of the nature and function of grammar, a description of basic English sentence patterns is used to present a model grammar based on the…

An analysis of part-of-speech membership was made utilizing certain mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the nature of word classes. It was proposed that words of the same form class constitute "verbal habit families" on the basis of either a common grammatical meaning response, a common affix, or a common label (e.g., "verb"). One…

This study examines the usage of preposition "pour" in the written and spoken French of two groups of Grade 9 and 12 Franco-Ontarian bilingual students from Welland and from the Sudbury area. Both the students' written and spoken French are shown to include a substantial proportion of constructions with "pour" which deviate…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…