Describes and examines the taxonomic linguistic system, a multi-level classification of language. Notes that this system not only formed the basis for all reading instruction, but also influenced reading research. Argues that this system should be replaced by one less simplistic and more realistic. (MM)

A discussion of possessives, determiners, and modifiers covers the following topics: nonuniformity of nouns, distributional differences between demonstratives and definitive articles, and German possessives and the determiner-modifier continuum. (Contains eight references.) (LB)

This article examines rule-governed characteristics of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) by applying Hyme's Verse Analysis to its discourse processes. Focusing on versification and reiteration, the article concludes that the narrative structure of HCE is poetic and metrical, and that these structures might constitute part of narrative grammar in creole…

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…

Infants' ability to rapidly extract properties of language-like systems during brief laboratory exposures has been taken as evidence about the innate linguistic state of humans. However, previous studies have focused on structural properties that are not central to descriptions of natural language. In the current study, infants were exposed to 3-…

Drai and Grodzinsky have statistically analyzed a large corpus of data on the comprehension of passives by patients with Broca's aphasia. The data come, according to Drai and Grodzinsky, from binary choice tasks. Among the languages that are analyzed are Dutch and German. Drai and Grodzinsky argue that Dutch and German speaking Broca patients…

We respond to critical comments and consider alternative statistical and syntactic analyses of our target paper which analyzed comprehension scores of Broca's aphasic patients from multiple sentence types in many languages, and showed that Movement but not Complexity or Mood are factors in the receptive deficit of these patients. Specifically, we…

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…

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

Uses the stratificational model of the American linguist S. M. Lamb to analyze a Volkswagen advertisement. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

This article is a follow-up to the author's "Developments in the Teaching of the Russian Verbal System," in which determination of the "basic stem" is discussed. Here, the morphological behavior of Russian verbs is outlined, according to a classification system grounded on this basic stem. (Text is in Russian.) (DH)

Cited are 573 U.S. and foreign articles, reports, and books particularly relevant to the field of computational linguistics with selective coverage in the fields of computation and programming, and social science uses of computers as language processors. In the area of linguistics, a fairly broad view of structural theory and semantics is taken…

This document is designed to aid the teacher in bridging the gap created by apparently divergent approaches to the study of language. It attempts to identify certain basic assumptions prerequisite to the study of language and to give the teacher an overview of the traditional, structural, and transformational-generative approaches to the study of…

The structure of any and all written discourse can be described using four basic relationships (those implied by "therefore,""but,""and then," and "and") and three combined relations between sentences and clusters of sentences. (DD)

Traces the development of Saussure's synchronic/diachronic distinction, and investigates this distinction from the point of view of methodology and theory. (AM)