The verb "take" as presented by Langendoen and McCawley is examined in order to prove to the reader that transformational generative grammar suffers from a disregard of empirical fact. (Author/LG)

Presents an heuristic procedure, based on cooccurrence of forms, for identifying the closed systems of a language and to show how the systems interlock, differ in meaning, and manifest themselves. (AM)

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

Weakening and deletion of syllable-final and word-final phonemes, a phenomenon prevalant in Puerto Rican Spanish, was studied. Two of these phonemes, /s#/ and /n#/ were examined for their capacity as plural markers. Data were collected during a one-year ethnographically-oriented study of a single block in the Puerto Rican community in north…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

Proposes a reexamination of the ellipsis within the framework of discourse grammar, as opposed to a grammar of sentence structure. (AM)

This paper examines the status of surface structure in transformational grammar, and the way that surface structure mediates the contacts between the phonological and semantic components of the grammar. Surface structure refers not to a single but to at least four distinct notions that do not necessarily define a homogeneous level of…

This paper investigates a type of grammatical ill-formedness in English which is traceable to the repetition, under certain specified conditions, of present participles, e.g. the verb "continue" cannot occur with participles if it is in the present progressive. The solution to generalizing about ill-formedness of this type is by means of a…

This paper seeks to discover the rules active in the formation of tags (intonation tags, declarative tags, and tag questions) in English. The author discusses former analyses of these constructions and presents his own thoughts with many examples, concluding that English has at least two tag formation rules: one that accounts (perhaps…

Presents an analysis of noun phrases in which the definite article is used and omitted. Several studies are reviewed and two types of occurrences are distinguished: direct (agent, instrument, object) and oblique (locative, dative). The relationships, perceptible in the deep structure, are blurred in the transformations leading to surface…

This review of Bever's psycholinguistics survey is for the most part favorable. Commentary is centered on sections 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the report. The survey's first part is judged significant in that Wundt's pioneering work in psycholinguistics is discussed. The second section, on grammar as a psychological process, is found obscure in its…

It is proposed that the notion of "address" is neither meaning nor form but that it designates the form which designates meaning. It is therefore in a position underlying both form and meaning. (AMH)

This paper defines the structure of a semantic network for use in representing discourse and lexical meanings. The structure is designed to represent underlying semantic meanings that, with a lexicon and a grammar, can generate natural-language sentences in a linguistically justifiable manner. The semantics of natural English can be defined as a…

The source of syntactic ambiguity and facts concerning the resolution of such ambiguity are discussed in this paper. The attitude of qenerative linguists towards ambiguity is examined, and a working distinction is drawn between vaqueness and ambiguity. The consequences of this distinction are then examined for syntactic ambiguity and an ordering…