A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

A native speaker of a language possesses both grammatical and rhetorical competence. A grammatical model, in its deep structure, represents an "is a" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of a human being as a human being. A rhetorical model represents a "counts as" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of…

This article outlines a model of the two basic components of a text, namely, the system of formal linguistic rules, and the realization of these rules into concrete discourse, by means of particular transformations. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…

An examination of recent linguistic and sociolinguistic studies on bilingualism has resulted in a reappraisal of the notion of interference. The implications of this reappraisal lead to the conclusion that the principles of transformational generative grammar could successfully be applied to the study of bilingualism if the bilingual's mental…

There is a need for a new kind of linguistic theory which, while being concerned with both generation and analysis, must include the roles of memory, non-linguistic knowledge, and inference. The role of logic is diminished according to such a theory because inference has no real logical content. Meaning must be studied with respect to the actual…

The 13-year study reported in this monograph attempted to accumulate a mass of longitudinal data on every aspect of linguistic behavior in 211 students representing a cross-section of American urban children. Presented as the major objectives of the study, which followed the subjects from kindergarten through grade 12, are 11 hypotheses to be…