Prosody carries a lot of information relevant for our understanding of spoken messages. In addition, prosody plays an important role in signalling attitudes and emotions. Prosodic features also constitute an important resource that participants use to achieve mutual understanding in interaction. The aim of this study was to point to possible…

Compares two analyses of a verb phrase deletion in a particular English sentence with a third analysis and shows that the analysis that takes the word "would" in the sentence as a proform has significant advantages over the analysis that posits a deletion site after "would." (SED)

This paper presents evidence that English may be a completely caseless language, like Chinese, contrary to the widely held view that distinct pronoun forms and the genitive "'s" involve morphological case. It argues that "I" and "me" are both personal pronouns whereas "my,""mine," and "'s" are possessive pronouns. Contains 31 references. (MDM)

This study examined the referential properties of a class of complex pronouns labelled M-Pronouns, exemplified by Old English "himself," French "lui-meme," and English "his own." It is shown that M-Pronouns exhibit some properties commonly taken as characterizing reflexive anaphors, and that they also occur as…

A structural-functional basis for the construction of an English tense system is proposed. It is asserted that such a system will facilitate the teaching of English tense usage. (Author/RM)

Discusses some types of writing tasks, such as advertising, in which a writer might want to create ambiguous wordplays. States that a more conscious understanding of the structure of a language could make the generation of structural ambiguities easier. Examines some structural features of English that could prove useful to advertisers who wish to…

The article reports on a comparative study of the abilities of aphasic speakers and normal control subjects to comprehend and produce verbs and sentences. The analysis is based on test results obtained as part of the standardization procedure for a test battery originally developed for Dutch and since translated and adapted for English and…

This article presents evidence supporting the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English and other languages, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Also discussed is the challenge that binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct…

Expanded version of an article originally written under the auspices of the 1970 MSSB Advanced Research Seminar in Mathematical Linguistics and presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, July 23, 1970, Columbus, Ohio. (DD)

The role of linguistic structure in a referential communication task was examined by comparing encoding and decoding performance of 80 five- and seven-year-old children from Japan and the United States. The linguist structure demanded by the task was the simultaneous encoding and decoding of attributes of size, color, pattern, and shape. (In…

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…