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,…

Synonyms are not in syntactic free-variation. Some text composition rules are examined and it is shown that they prevent the occurrence of paradoxical utterances which could arise if synonyms were freely substitutable. (Text is in German.) (TL)

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

This manual discusses recent research in the field of semantics. It was prepared as part of a series of books to be used in connection with a course of advanced study for experienced philologists and teachers. The Introduction and Part One are based mainly on the 1971-1972 course of lectures on Meaning Equivalence by Akhmanova, and discuss the…

Investigates the availability of surface representations for the interpretation of verb-phrase ellipsis. Results show that an elliptical verb phrase is most easily interpreted if its antecedent is in the immediately preceding sentence and that this can not be explained in terms of the unnaturalness of the passages with distant antecedents. (MM)

English teachers have a responsibility to interpret for students the current linguistic insights into language and to lead them in an open-minded inquiry involving (1) careful observation of language data, (2) translation of this observation into rule-like descriptions, and (3) verification of the rules to determine if revisions must be made. In…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

This paper discusses interrogative structures, based on the results and conclusions derived from comparing the interrogative systems of 79 randomly selected languages. The paper begins by listing a number of generalizations about interrogative structures based on disparate observations in the field. These generalizations constitute the basis for…

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…

A review of the background of transformational grammar and a discussion of Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" begin this introduction to the "new" grammar. Following discussions are on the components of a theoretically complete grammar, the main deep structure components (noun phrase, auxiliary, and verb phrase), grammatical relationships,…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

Outlines how the current work in linguistics and psychology can be joined with rhetoric in the study of cohesion and suggests the ways in which this synthesis leads to both a literary and philosophical sense of form and a practical pedagogy for teachers. (MM)

This paper describes predicate adjective usage in modern standard Russian using a corpus of written Russian derived from "Pravda" (neutral literary style) and "Krokodil" (conversational material). The short, long nominative, and instrumental forms are examined in relation to the type of adjective, copulative verb, sentence subject, and other…