Conference held in the Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, in December 1972; discusses various papers presented at the conference. (HK)

Surveys trends in linguistic thought over the past 50 years, with particular reference to structuralism and generative grammar. (AM)

In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…

This paper examines the relationship that exists between the syntactic and phonological components of the transformational-generative model insofar as their formal structures are concerned. It is demonstrated that the number and importance of the structural similarities between the syntax and the phonology make it necessary to provide for them in…

Investigates the availability of surface representations for the interpretation of verb-phrase ellipsis. Results show that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence and that this can not be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents. (MM)

English teachers have a responsibility to interpret for students the current linguistic insights into language and to lead them in an open-minded inquiry involving (1) careful observation of language data, (2) translation of this observation into rule-like descriptions, and (3) verification of the rules to determine if revisions must be made. In…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

A review of the background of transformational grammar and a discussion of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" begin this introduction to the "new" grammar. Following discussions are on the components of a theoretically complete grammar, the main deep structure components (noun phrase, auxiliary, and verb phrase), grammatical relationships,…

Two traditions are distinguishable in modern linguistic theory: the tradition of "universal grammar" which flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the tradition of structural or descriptive linguistics which reached its peak 15 or 20 years ago. Universal grammar was concerned with (1) the relation of deep structure to surface forms and to…

Any theory of stylistics sets itself the task of accounting for choices made by a speaker/writer among theoretically available and more-or-less equivalent linguistic structures. This task is a stumbling-block in the way of most attempts to construct a theory of style because there is no consistent method of defining 'available structures' and…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

This paper describes predicate adjective usage in modern standard Russian using a corpus of written Russian derived from "Pravda" (neutral literary style) and "Krokodil" (conversational material). The short, long nominative, and instrumental forms are examined in relation to the type of adjective, copulative verb, sentence subject, and other…

Transformational grammar offers the most adequate system by which to meet the goal of grammar instruction, which is to increase the student's understanding of the nature of language. This grammar attempts to explain the mental processes underlying the production and understanding of sentences, to describe linguistic competence, to construct…

This volume contains the papers presented at a workshop which brought together authorities from several different disciplines, each working in the area of natural language analysis, to participate in intensive, technical discussions of the issues involved in developing adequate grammars and semantics of natural languages. The disciplines…