Reports three studies of comprehension of French subject relative clauses and two forms of object relative clauses. The first tested the hypothesis that competition between noun phrases, memory load, and perspective maintenance determine difficulty of role assignment in reversible relative clauses; others compared subject relatives and inverted…

Following a brief summary of Trubetzkoy's views of Russian word roots, a statistical analysis is performed on a short literary passage in seeking to examine whether all types of roots merely coexist in modern Russian or whether there is an expansion of certain types and a contraction of others. Results point out statistical and semantic…

Discusses the situational-structural syllabus with emphasis on more clearly defining objectives in both scope and content. Four directions for these syllabi are suggested: (1) priority of semantic and functional notions; (2) subordination of grammatical features; (3) introduction of spoken language discourse; and (4) reduction of grammatical…

This French text of selected articles, lectures, and writings from Bally to Jakobson presents a typology of literary styles, complementing an introductory book on the theory and readings in stylistics by dealing with the problems and methods of stylistic analysis. Seeking to arrive at a description of the inner structure of literary texts, it…

The relation of the linguistic sciences to language teaching and language learning is explored. Part 1 discusses linguistics, phonetics, and their place in the description of language. Relations between language and the people who use it are examined, as well as the place of comparison and translation in the acquisition of a second language. Part…

A study of Dakota Sioux presents evidence for Possessor Ascension. In this construction, a nominal that is semantically a possessor is syntactically not a constituent of the noun phrase but a constituent of the clause. The report first discusses the universal characterization of Possessor Ascension in the framework of relational grammar, and…

Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

The goal of this paper is to explore the ramifications of a nontraditional view of cognition and social interaction for the study of grammatical structure. (Contains 77 references.) (JL)

In many languages, the article cannot occur when a possessive phrase is present in the noun phrase (NP). Argues that these patterns can be understood in terms of economic motivation because possessed NPs are very likely to be definite. Shows how the performance motivation of economy creates the competence pattern in diachronic change. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the bare-noun phrase (NP) complementation pattern of the Spanish verb "tener" (have). Shows that the maximality of the complement NP is dependent upon three factors: (1) idiosyncratic valence requirements; (2) encyclopedic knowledge related to possession; and (3) contextualized semantic construal. (Author/VWL)

Presents a replication of experiments which found that input practice is better than output practice for comprehension skills, and no worse than output practice for production skills in a second language (Spanish). Findings reveal that these patterns are obscured when the testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question…

This paper focuses on the temporal and modal meanings associated with root infinitives (RIs) and other non-finite clauses in several typologically diverse languages--English, Russian, Greek and Dutch. I discuss the role that event structure, aspect, and modality play in the interpretation of these clauses. The basic hypothesis is that in the…

A survey of the substance of linguistics and of the activities of linguists is presented in an attempt to acquaint ordinary readers with the various aspects of la"guage. A discussion of the human tendency toward speech, of the traits of language, and of phonetic elements prepares the way for an analysis of the structure of languag e in terms of…

An analysis of Kilega, a Bantu language spoken in eastern Zaire, focuses on the relative positions of subject and verb and agreement patterns, with particular attention to WH-movement. It is found that Kilega is a subject-verb-object language, but exhibits some variant patterns. WH-movement triggers verb-subject inversion and shifts agreement. The…

A discussion of autosegmental phonology (AP), a theory of phonological representation that uses graphs rather than strings as the central data structure, considers its principal constraint, the "No Crossing Constraint" (NCC). The NCC is the statement that in a well-formed autosegmental diagram, lines of association may not cross. After…