Examines the idiomatic meaning carried in a sentence through the syntactic idiom. The infinitive of negative result is used to examine the understanding of the meaning carried in a sentence by its syntactic structure. (GLR)

Discusses trends and developments in generative phonology; metatheory and evidence in phonology; and segments, features, and marking. (RL)

Discusses the complement and predicate (or adjunct) short clauses (SCs) in active transitive verb structures. Published Spanish literature is reviewed and evaluated, Spanish SC surface structure (SS) is described, an argument is presented against SS restructuring in Spanish, and analyses of several hypotheses are provided. (GLR)

Research has identified three reading strategies that are affected in various ways by signaling--the emphasis of superordinate relationships in text. Using a structure strategy, readers follow the text's superordinate relations to focus on the text's message and how it relates to supportive details. Readers who use the detail/list strategy focus…

For the past 30 years, much has been written about the works of Noam Chomsky. A comparison is presented of the latest writings about Chomsky (in particular P.M.S. Hacker's 1990 work) with those written in the early 1960s. (CFM)

Considers marked and unmarked structures in modern Arabic in terms of defending a basic unmarked structure which carries the least presuppositional background to which other surface orders can be related and a lexical treatment of number in Arabic. (CB)

The linguistic complexity of humor is illustrated with examples of word play translated from French to English and English to French. Examples from the writings of James Joyce and Marcel Proust are highlighted. (CB)

Presents rules for the correct use of the French pronouns "ce" and "il," based on the criterion of discourse coherence and an understanding of the principles underlying the use of demonstrative vs. personal pronouns. (MSE)

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…

Discusses a preliminary and sketchy hypothesis of second language comprehension based on empirical investigations into strategies and processes specific to second language comprehension. (Author/CB)

An overview of contemporary Hispanic dialectology, focusing on phonological phenomena, syntax, classification schemes, and bilingual communities, demonstrates that dialectology has long ceased to be the collection of innumerable surface deviations. It is suggested that dialectology is a theoretical discipline searching for universal principles to…

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

Discusses the use of prepositional phrases as subjects and objects through consideration and analysis of: (1) characteristics of such phrases; (2) category status of prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions; and (3) sentences containing prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions. (CB)

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…