SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like "The leaf fell" involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows…

Identifies various speech styles of English as marked by stance adverbials. Indicates that the discourse functions of stance adverbials differ considerably from the functions suggested by their literal meanings. (JK)

Refutes the theory that indirect requests are ambiguous. Arguments for it are examined and an attempt is made to expose the weaknesses in the kinds of tests generally used to detect "illocutionary" ambiguity. An alternative analysis in the framework of semantics and the pragmatics of directive speech acts is suggested. (AMH)

This research discusses the probability of child witnesses providing a complete and accurate description of an event. Children have been regarded as particularly inaccurate, highly suggestible, and basically unreliable in court cases. Psychologists have concluded that younger children are much more suggestible than older children or adults, and a…

This work treats some of the important issues encountered in an attempt to synthesize natural sounding English speech from arbitrary written text. Details of the systems that interact in producing speech are described. The principal systems dealt with are phonology (intonation), phonetics, syntax, semantics, and text-view (discourse). Technical…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

The project described in this report examines the development of Swedish-speaking children's syntax from the appearance of the first two-work sentences until all the basic syntactical rules are mastered. The procedures and techniques for the experiment are described and preliminary findings are discussed. Children practice language by repeating an…

This volume brings together the majority of lectures and papers presented at the 1998 and 1999 discourse symposia at Vaxjo University. Part one, "Four Perspectives on Discourse," offers a matrix perspective on narrative, a cross cultural perspective on academic rhetoric, a cognitive perspective on informational discourse, and a construction…

This is a longitudinal study of a child's acquisition of Mandarin phonology between the ages of 1;2 and 2;8. During this period, the child was much less verbal than many children reported in other child phonology studies. The study consists of two parts. The first part is a description of the child's "proto-language," in which he used…

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

The material in this book is the result of an investigation to determine how to teach English intonation effectively and to find the smallest number of patterns which could be used as a basis for initial drills in the language. The book presents a statement of the structure of the English intonation system in relation to the structural systems of…

Examines the idea of a mismatch between grammaticality and acceptability. Evidence is used to refute the claim that ungrammatical but acceptable sentences are theoretically plausible in the case of the sentence, "A not unhappy person entered the room." (AMH)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Violations of Frege's Principle and Their Significance for Contrastive Semantics" (Dafydd Gibbon); "Writing the Contrastive Grammar of English and Dutch. The Treatment of Modal Notions" (Flor Aarts and Herman Wekker); "The Theory and Methodology…