THIS PAPER CONSIDERS SEVERAL TYPES OF ENGLISH SENTENCES WHICH ARE UTTERED FOR THE PURPOSE OF ELICITING A LINGUISTIC RESPONSE FROM THE HEARER AND WHICH, ON THAT BASIS, CAN BE CLASSED AS QUESTIONS. A SEMANTIC UNIT "PLUS INTERROGATIVE", WHOSE MEANING IS THAT THE SPEAKER REQUESTS NEW INFORMATION FROM THE HEARER, IS SEEN TO PLAY A ROLE IN MORE THAN ONE…

Two experiments showed that functional completeness--the explicit propositional surface realization of deep-structure clause relations--isolated effective and integral comprehension units, which definitions of comprehension units couched in levels of syntactic structure failed to do. (Author/RL)

Investigation supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun-noun compounds. Results indicate that semantic relationships that hold between members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of appropriate compounding relationships. (CHK)

A sentence-reading procedure was used to study the influence of syntactic structure on the timing of syllables in speech production. The study was designed to test whether syllable lengthening might be sensitive to the distinction between surface and underlying structure. (Author/RM)

Research based on a master's thesis submitted at Michigan State University. (VM)

Sketches Noam Chomsky's conception of language, the ways it can and should be studied, and how it works as a scientific enterprise. (Author/GT)

THE AUTHOR RECOUNTS THE RISE IN IMPORTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION, WHICH TOGETHER WITH LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING COMPRISE THE MAJOR FIELDS OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS. MUCH OF THE RECENT THEORETICAL WORK ON LANGUAGE DEALS WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SURFACE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE AND THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE. THE…

This article discusses the notion of the proposition in the philosophy of language. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Compares two analyses of a verb phrase deletion in a particular English sentence with a third analysis and shows that the analysis that takes the word "would" in the sentence as a proform has significant advantages over the analysis that posits a deletion site after "would." (SED)

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)