Sentences in a high school French I textbook were examined to determine the extent to which the writers controlled French syntactic surface structures in terms of their differences with English equivalents. Results show students were exposed to L1-L2 syntactic differences without explanation, and such sentences could cause future difficulties.…

Explains Spanish pronominalization as one simple process, and notes its application the teaching and learning of Spanish. (CHK)

Proposes an approach to contrastive linguistics which takes into account syntax and semantics, and discusses the role of such an approach in explaining surface structure differences between English and Chinese sentences of the type: "He is a good pianist" and "I have a bad knee." (AM)

This article notes some problems arising from treating verb-final German word order as basic, as suggested by previous articles, and suggests that communicative competence and understanding of work-order principles would be better achieved with early introduction and drill in all three order types. (CHK)

A method is proposed for formalizing the basic meanings underlying the forms of verbs which contain future reference. The method proposed is intended as a contribution to pedagogical grammar rather than theoretical linguistics. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

A method of teaching question formation in the Chinese language by use of transformational grammar is described. (RM)

Basic to composition skill is control of sentence structure and accuracy in mechanics. Although it is often said that a student should not write what he has not first heard and practiced orally, it might equally well be said that he should not be expected to write grammatical patterns that he has not read, inasmuch as there is a difference in the…

Describes a study using transformational generative grammar to demonstrate that the frequently used structure "verb a verb" in Spanish is to be interpreted in three ways. Conclusions are drawn for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language. (AMH)

A corpus of 10,000 sentences extracted from British theatrical texts was used to construct a frequency list of kernel sentence structures. Thirty-one charts illustrate the analyzed results. The procedures used and an interpretation of the frequencies are given. Such lists might aid foreign language teachers in course organization. Available from…

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,…

Both English and Finnish make use of a category called the passive voice. In most cases these passives correspond to each other, but both are subject to restrictions. This paper attempts to determine how English passives overlap with the semantic area covered by the Finnish passive and what the choices are which face a speaker of Finnish in…