The expression of modal meanings presents a difficulty even for advanced speakers of a foreign language and it has been shown that beginning and intermediate learners produce few modal auxiliaries. To investigate the phenomenon, a functional/semantic framework was used to determine what forms these students use to convey a particular meaning. The…

The relationship of one aspect of conversational style, the degree of directness in the sending and interpretation of messages, to ethnicity was investigated in a comparison of the communication styles of Greeks and Americans. It was hypothesized that Greeks tend to be more indirect in speech than Americans, and that English speakers of Greek…

The relationship between ease of comprehension and the syntactic form used to convey indirect requests was investigated among intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language (ESL). The results were compared to those of native English speaking children and adults. Subjects were 82 college students enrolled in intensive ESL…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

To investigate children's ability to make linguistic judgments, a 60-item Awareness of Acceptable Sentences task was constructed. This task and the reading subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were administered to 144 children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Analyses of results indicated that children's performance on the…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

To express that a degree of one event is conditioned by (or paralleled by) a degree of another, the "the...the..." construction with a comparative after each "the" is used. Examples include sentences such as: (1) the more dangerous mountains are to climb, the more challenging they are; (2) the more often a man has been in…

A study was conducted to determine the efficacy of utilizing Leach's interrogation model as a means for analyzing question types used by mothers and their children's responses to various interrogative forms. Data analyzed consisted of language samples obtained from three preschool children and their mothers during mother-child interactions plus…

This paper reports on a preliminary quantitative study of syntactic constraints on code-switching within discourses in which no change in participants, setting or topic is evident. The goals of the study are to provide a syntactic description of the points at which switches from Spanish to English and English to Spanish are possible and to assess…

Overlapping samples of 191, 142, and 87 undergraduates rated pairs of sentences for the frequency and acceptability of the syntactic constructions represented to investigate the feasibility of using such ratings in the study of syntactic forms. The results indicated that subjects are consistent in their judgments of both the frequency and…

Data from undergraduates' ratings of the frequency and acceptability of selected syntactic constructions are analyzed for linguistically defined sets. Mean ratings of frequency and acceptability as well as the results from a cluster analysis of each set of sentences are given for seven target contrasts: active/passive, may/might, perfect/past,…

Discusses the problem of the lack of native speakers to judge grammatical acceptability in analyzing a dead language such as Latin, and proposes an analysis on the level of linguistic performance. (AM)

In this study the inadequacies of rules governing the present perfect in isolated sentences are discussed and then two contextual factors thought to be connected with current relevance and the use of the present perfect are described. These factors are experimentally shown to influence use of the present perfect significantly. (CHK)

Analyzes intermediate English-as-a-second-language learners' (N=63) written responses to high and low cognitive level questions. Results indicate that although the degree of linguistic inaccuracy remained stable, the higher order of cognition increased both the amount and the order of syntactic complexity of written English responses. (Author/CB)

Examines the range of conditional sentences which appear in English in contrast to the restricted selection of conditionals usually presented to foreign students. Sample exercises for identifying types of conditionals and determining appropriate conditional structures are provided. (Author/LMO)