English language learners are often more grammatically accurate in writing than in speaking. As students focus on meaning while speaking, their spoken fluency comes at a cost: their grammatical accuracy decreases. The author wanted to find a way to help her students improve their oral grammar; that is, she wanted them to focus on grammar while…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

Background: Agrammatic speech can manifest in different ways in the same speaker if task demands change. Individual variation is considered to reflect adaptation, driven by psycholinguistic factors such as underlying deficit. Recently, qualitative investigations have begun to show ways in which conversational interaction can influence the form of…

The grammar which is concerned with meaning (the province of New Semantics), with its foundations in our perceptions of the surrounding world, can be learned in the elementary classroom through storytelling. Understanding of the sentence concept develops by allowing the child to use his language responsively and deliberately to organize the world…

The advantages and weaknesses of conventional grammar and structural linguistics are the subjects of this pamphlet. Reasons given for the widespread attack on conventional grammar are that it has resulted in repetitive and time-consuming instruction, has not improved the students' language skills, has been confused with language usage, and does…

The speed at which sentences with various kinds of violations could be rejected was studied. Compatible with the sequential model was the finding that noun-verb and adjective-noun double violations did not result in shorter reaction times than noun-verb single violations, although double violations were judged less acceptable. (Author/RD)

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…

The serious student of language, English or foreign, and especially the future language teacher must receive a solid training not only in theoretical but also in applied syntax. Such a course should be offered at the advanced level and deal with the syntax of the language involved in a rigorously systematic way. The search for a systematic, yet…