Schaeffer (1997, 2000) argues that children lack knowledge of specificity because Dutch children omit determiners and fail to scramble pronouns. Avrutin & Brun (2001), however, find that Russian children place arguments correctly according to whether they are specific or non-specific. This paper investigates object agreement and specificity in…

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,…

Criticizes Stanley B. Greenfield's essay, Grammar and Meaning in Poetry" ( PMLA," vol. 82, pp. 377-87), which won the Modern Language Association's Research Activities Award in 1968. (SW)

In looking at the hierarchical structure of a composition, it is practical to diagram the natural text in T-units in a three-dimensional matrix based on the three hierarchical relationships between T-units: coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate. In this matrix, a coordinate relationship, which results from conjoining, elaborating, and…

The role of linguistics and its importance in the areas of cognitive development, psychology and semantics is discussed. (DEP)

A guide to linguistic analysis and to the three co-existing grammars--conventional, structural, and transformational--this glossary, which is directed to the beginning student, provides descriptions of terms and topics as they are used in their most frequent and familiar senses. Encyclopedic descriptions and information about the referent are…

Examines the reason why new grammar has failed to make the impact that was predicted fifteen or so years ago.(RB)

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SELECED ASPECTS OF THE LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH IS PRESENTED IN THIS MONOGRAPH. FOLLOWING A DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE AND AN EXPLANATION OF THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS, THE PEDAGOGICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE INADEQUACIES OF TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR ARE EXAMINED. THE CONSIDERATION OF STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IN ENGLISH CENTERS ON PHONOLOGY…

BECAUSE OF LIMITATIONS DURING THE ACTUAL STUDY, THIS PROJECT WAS DELIMITED TO THE STUDY OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING MATERIALS ADAPTED FROM STRUCTURAL AND GENERATIVE GRAMMARS UPON THE ABILITY OF SEVENTH-GRADE STUDENTS TO WRITE MORE MATURE COMPOSITIONS. FORTY-THREE STUDENTS WERE GIVEN EXPERIMENTAL LINGUISTICALLY-ORIENTED MATERIALS DESIGNED TO…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

Two widely used first-grade reading series, Ginn and Scott-Foresman, were analyzed in terms of six phrase-structure grammars in an attempt to discover frequencies for sentence types. The six grammars were noun phrase, verb phrase, verbal modifier, statements without verbs, interrogative, and statements with verbs. Categorial grammars were written…

Version of a paper read at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, NOvember 1969, in Washington, D.C. (DS)