This paper examines form and meaning of a class of simple sentences in which various constituents are brought into focus by the speaker. The Akan language is used, and the syntactic processes, or focus-marking, required to derive surface structures of the sentences are examined. (CK)

An examination of various linguists' definitions of parataxis, asyndeton, and juxtaposition shows that the concepts are often varying and lack precision. The author offers new definitions which distinguish three specific cases. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The research reported is part of an investigation into the acquisition of grammar, using nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Three children were seen for approximately 8 hours, every 6 weeks, in their homes, from the age of 19 months--soon after the earliest…

Contrasts the syntactic view of forward and backward deletion of base structure elements with the idea that pragmatic factors of situational redundancy and perceptual grouping account for conjunction reduction in children. (EKN)

The "direct discourse analysis" introduced by Susumu Kuno is examined and found to be inadequate. To account for the data Kuno discusses, as well as for related data, a new approach to transformations is suggested. By determining the function, rather than the form, of a transformation, certain predictions are possible. Primary is the…

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…