Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

Students need to learn the involved patterns of sentences in the English language as well as the inherent structure. First, the paper discusses five common sentence patterns in the English language, with examples. Next, the paper deals with modifiers to extend sentences, including adjectives, adverbs, appositives, and dependent clauses. Finally,…

The central thesis of this book is that the laws of traditional "command grammar" are an obstruction to expression and are too difficult for a majority of people to master, as demonstrated by a progressive deterioration in general literacy skills. The book contends that the structure of the sentence is at the source of the present difficulties. It…

This study investigated subjects' ability to combine and organize information from different sentences, as well as their ability to retain that information. Ninety-six college undergraduates were given three trials to learn the characteristics of ships from a text. Attributes of each ship were clustered together (name organization), or sentences…

Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like ''Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,'' alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (''Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,'' or ''Jane showed to her mother the letter to…

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)

Paper presented to the staff of the English Language Branch--Defense Language Institute, Lockland Air Force Base, Lockland, Texas, 1973. (HW)

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (VM)

Research supported in part by a graduate traineeship from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to the author and by a grant from the Advanced Research Project Agency to the Harvard University Center for Cognitive Studies. (VM)

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

The first half of this document reports on research that explores the ways in which knowledge of the world affects judgments of sentence acceptability. Sixty children in grades four through eight were studied at two times, one year apart. The subjects were first interviewed regarding their knowledge of the world in order to identify their role…

Developed as part of a high school quinmester unit on sentences, this guide provides the teacher with teaching strategies for a study of the acceptable patterns of kernel sentences and transformation, identification of rhetorical styles in prose and poetry, and the application of these principles to produce a variety of effective sentences. The…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

The problem of determining the nature of this special form-class is seen in historical, linguistic perspective. A syntactic definition of predicatives as a word class with five types of morphological variation is included. The establishment of a word class or subclass on such a syntactic basis is suggested. (RL)

An analysis of "de" sentences in Chinese in order to capture their syntactic and semantic features and, as a result, to state rules for generating them. The study is organized under eight headings and provides 147 examples in Chinese and English. (AMH)