A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

A study of reciprocals in Japanese compares two kinds: (1) a verbal suffix "aw"; and (2) an NP argument "otagai." Although "otagai" appears to be taken care of by syntactic binding theory, it is proposed that there is no evidence for the existence of a syntactic position of the object NP in the case of "aw." The suffix can be characterized as…

A cross-modal priming experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that lexical access of verbs marked with a specific inflectional suffix would be facilitated by immediately prior exposure to semantically and contextually unrelated verbs with the same suffix. It was hypothesized that while listening to spoken "-ed" sentences,…

Presents an heuristic procedure, based on cooccurrence of forms, for identifying the closed systems of a language and to show how the systems interlock, differ in meaning, and manifest themselves. (AM)

Reports on research on the acquisition of adjectives vs inflectional endings in Italian children. Patterns resulting from a longitudinal study involving two children and an experiment involving 84 children are compared to patterns of adults participating in the latter experiment. (Author/AM)

All the irregularities of all common French verbs are reduced to five categories in the "passe simple." This system facilitates learning the tense without memorizing each irregular verb independently. (PMJ)

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…

This paper provides an analysis of Choctaw morphology based on the orthographical system described by the same author (See FL 002 864). The author begins with a discussion of the articles, cases, and conjunctions of Choctaw, considering their forms and uses. A consideration of independent and dependent personal pronouns follows and forms the basis…

This paper proposes that some but not all "I" causatives in Korean are analyzable, and argues that case markers in Korean are not merely surface phenomena, but are semantically and syntactically significant. The types of Korean causatives are introduced, as well as the major problems involved in their analysis. Previous generative works…

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

A questionnaire used to elicit from university students their uses for, attitudes about, and problem areas in French vocabulary learning is presented and discussed. In the questionnaire, a series of brief lexical exercises tests understanding of word similarities and commonalities, lexical functions, registers, antonyms, paraphrasing,…

Papers from the conference on the occurrence of verbal constituents in series in certain languages, particularly pidgins and creoles, include the following: "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Serial Verbs?" (Arnold M. Zwicky); "Serial Verb Constructions" (Pieter Seuren); "On the Definition and Distribution of…

Papers from the conference on linguistic anomaly include: "La definition interactive de la deviance en situation exolingue et bilingue" ("The Interactive Definition of Deviation in Exolinguistic and Bilingual Situations") (Bernard Py); "La negociation ratee: pratiques sociales et methodes interactives du traitement de la…