This dissertation examines the particle "ye" in the IV century BCE Chinese Guodian manuscripts by providing a synchronic analysis of its functions and a diachronic hypothesis relating all functions to focus marking. I have subdivided the around 600 occurrences of "ye" into four main functions: focus marker, topic marker, clause connection…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…

Offers suggestions about explaining the use of the accusative case in Russian time expressions. (PMP)

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

This comparative study of traditional and transformational approaches to the syntax of standard Russian proposes the superiority of analysis in terms of possible and impossible transformations, thereby revealing the existence of a level of linguistic form superior to that of simple morphophonemic description. Five classes of word-combinations of…

This paper is concerned with the syntactic problems raised by the grammatical phenomenon in Japanese that is called here the "complementizer." In the types of sentences under consideration here, S2 is a nominal clause. Such a clause acts as a noun phrase adjunct to the verb in S1. The noun clauses in question are often followed by a…

Presents a reworking of the rules of genitive singular inflection in German nouns, allowing the prediction of the distribution of "s" and "es" in a greater number of nouns than previously possible. (AM)

Syntactic differences between languages are the focus of attention in this approach to contrastive study of grammatical categories. The categories of the first language are listed in a "translation-paradigm" opposite the possible categories of the target language after translation of the corpus. Three examples which contrast the clause, verbal…

This book is a selected distillation of linguistic scholarship which describes from both a historical (diachronic) and a contemporary (synchronic) viewpoint that conglomerate set of dialects and idiolects called English. The emphasis is on contemporary American English. But foreign language examples are also given in an attempt to demonstrate the…

The first volume of this series is divided into reports, studies, and preliminary results of work in progress. All were presented at a meeting on contrastive linguistics held in Romania. The project is intended to reveal the specificity of the structures and systems of Romanian and English with a view to comparing them and, on that basis,…

The aim of this study is to give a description of the linguistic position of the negative genitive in written Russian and to explain the relationship between different factors. It is demonstrated that the negative genitive still holds its position as the stronger case in negative clauses with 69 percent of all sample cases in the genitive, as…

Discussion of the French partitive article based on its example in the metonymic use of the proper name to describe the work of an artist, e.g., C'est de l'Eluard,'' (That's a bit of Eluard). (RS)

Examination of the behavior of different types of Spanish complements in two different grammatical constructions supports the argument that behavior differences result from the complement's different pragmatic status. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that complements representing old information appear in the subjunctive mood. The notion…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…

Beginning chapters of this volume define language and describe the sound, stress, and intonation systems of English. The body of the text explores extensively morphology, phonetics, phonemics, and the process of communication. Individual chapters detail such topics as morphemes, syntactic devices, grammatical systems, phonemic problems in language…