Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform…

Tentative conclusions were that controlled sentence practice and sentence combining can increase the overall writing effectiveness and syntactic maturity of college students in a single semester. (DD)

Describes a study which found that generative rhetoric instruction produced a quantitative and qualitative increase in college students' syntactic maturity. (DD)

Fourteen articles by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and linguists, bearing on the way foreign languages will be taught in the immediate future, constitute the major portion of this book. The contents include chapters on: (1) sociocultural context of language and literature, (2) Hispanic literature, (3) the use of contrastive…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: personal expressiveness in creative writing programs; generative rhetoric and writing performance; the effects of sentence combining exercises on syntactic…