Memory and storage for base and surface sentence forms were compared by examining memory for these kinds of sentences. It was hypothesized that a subject hearing a sentence transforms it to its base form, stores it in this form, and recalls it, again transforming it, in its surface form. Thirty undergraduate educational psychology students,…

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)

Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

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

An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

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

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)

Research supported by a U.S. Public Health Service Research Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (DD)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

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…