The aim of this paper is to determine whether the first predicate noun (NP) after the verb in sentences such as "Kelly gave Rose a piano" is the direct object or the indirect object in the surface structure of English. An analysis reveals that the direct object in English is not marked by its position immediately after a (transitive)…

The dependency approach to grammar, in which it is assumed that grammatical relations can be described in terms of a relation between two element types, a head and a dependent, is discussed in the context of Arabic. Operational criteria used for defining the notions of head and dependency are reviewed, and claims for the usefulness of recognizing…

A model is proposed that attempts to provide some order for the disparate findings with respect to the effects of signaling in text on recall. The type of signaling examined is that which explicitly cues the relationships among the major propositions in the text structure. It is noted that while it is generally assumed that such signaling is an…

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

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

Piaget's research on the processes and products of cognitive and representational development in early childhood is employed to outline the bases of early language development. The processes of assimilation and accommodation, leading to horizontal decalage; empirical and reflective abstraction, resulting in schemas and schemes; as well as…

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…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Spanish verbs pose contextual problems for the non-native speaker in his use of the subjunctive, reflexives, and pronouns. The semantic range and syntactic contexts of many common verbs are usually treated and learned very unsystematically. One ordinarily seeks answers to contextual questions from a dictionary, but dictionaries do not provide…

The study compared linguistic analyses of 27 language disabled and 30 normal language children in grades 1-6. The first procedure, cohesive tie analysis, examined surface characteristics of a text for connections between lingustic components that contribute to coherence; the second procedure, story grammar, examined underlying story organization…

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…

Recent analyses of Russian (Halle 1963, Lightner 1972) have been forced by the criteria of rule "naturalness" and rule "generality" to posit highly abstract underlying forms. These underlying forms and rules are claimed to represent the speaker's competence. Such analyses are now being criticized (Derwing 1973, Hooper 1974) on the following…

In Mandarin Chinese the two lexical items "de" and "bu," when inserted into a verb-verb construction, function as positive and negative potential markers, respectively, Their insertion, however, is not very regular or uniform, because some V-V constructions require their presence, while some others take them optionally, and…