These papers were written as supporting documents for a colloquium on the Vietnamese language. The first catalogues and analyzes Vietnamese vowels, diphthongs, consonants and tones. The second analyzes some facets of Vietnamese syntax. (CHK)

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES THE INTERSECTION OF THE NONSTANDARD ENGLISH DIALECT OF THE URBAN GHETTOS AND STANDARD ENGLISH. THE AUTHORS DRAW ON SOME PRELIMINARY DATA GATHERED IN PERSONAL INTERVIEWS, INCLUDING A RANDOM SAMPLE OF 100 LOWER- AND MIDDLE-INCOME ADULTS IN THREE AREAS OF SOUTH CENTRAL HARLEM. ALTHOUGH NEGRO SPEECH PATTERNS HAVE BEEN EXPLAINED AS…

In line with current thinking in transformational grammar, syntax as a system can and should be studied before a study is made of the use of that system. Chomsky's lexical redundancy rule is an area for further study, possibly to come closer to defining and achieving explanatory adequacy. If it is observed that English nouns come in two types,…

This paper examines certain of the cues to surface constituency that are salient to children in the comprehension of syntactic structure. Accessibility is studied through a set of experiments requiring seven-year-old children to repeat certain syntactic constituents. These children can correctly identify subjects and also predicate phrases with…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…