If in reading a sentence a reader finds something unfamiliar in lexical meaning or grammatical structures, the meaning of the written material may be ambiguous to him. Sometimes the context will help to clarify the meaning of an unfamiliar element, but often it won't. Understanding what is read involves not only the process of reasoning, but also…

This study assessed the effectiveness of five hours of distributed training on three-year-old children's comprehension and production of the passive, negative, possessive and negative passive syntactic structures. A comprehension test identified 20 children who did not evidence understanding of these structures. Subject were randomly assigned to…

Developed by the Oregon Elementary English Project, this curriculum unit introduces fifth and sixth graders to sentence structure. Based on transformational grammar, the unit (1) demonstrates to students their built-in knowledge of English grammar which enables them to produce and recognize sentences although they are not consciously aware of…

Students in grades 4, 5, or 6 can learn to write more concretely, accurately, and deliberately by employing three strategies: (1) elimination of those words or phrases that garble meaning or repeat unnecessarily; (2) substitution of more specific, concrete, and generally more appropriate expressions for ones that are vague and unimaginative; and…

This second volume of a three-part language research report presents a sketch of Hungarian syntax with emphasis on several particular aspects of grammar. The first section considers the noun phrase and covers such issues as internal word order, number, demonstratives, cases and postpositions, genitive constructions, pronominal forms of cases and…

This is the second supplement to "A Bibliography of Generative-Based Grammatical Analyses of Spanish." It includes all available materials that have appeared since February of 1975. This bibliography contains two general divisions: phonology and syntax/semantics. Information regarding the location of reviews and abstracts is included in most of…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

This article discusses prepositive expressions, expressions whose meaning is equivalent to that of one single preposition, and preposition groups in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Sensitivity to syntactic structure can be increased by direct instruction. (JH)

A contrastive analysis of Spanish word order is presented, first discussed in non-sentence constructions, and then in sentences and sentence-like constructions. A more productive methodology can be obtained in teaching word order through the balanced use of deductive and inductive methods. (NCR)

Five experiments examined how the duration of a word spoken in a sentence is influenced by the grammatical category to which it belongs, and the position of the word in a constituent. The findings indicated that a binary distinction between major and minor categories is sufficient for a theory of speech timing and synthesis. (Author/JAC)

This article hypothesizes that causative constructions among the languages of the world share some fundamental characteristics, even though they have different ordering restrictions and varying degrees of fusion. (Author/NCR)

A Spanish lesson is presented with sections on grammar, vocabulary, and expressions (modismos) with written test exercises and an assigned composition. (Text is in Spanish.) (NCR)

Mirror images in constituent order are found in a wide range of parallel clause types in Japanese and English. Three detailed explanations for linear orderings are provided. (Author/HP)

All modern Romance languages except Rumanian have a class of causative + infinitive construction in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive. This article investigates the question of how agentivization of the infinitive subject is to be handled in these languages. (DS)