Expanded version of a paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, St. Louis, Missouri, December 28, 1971; research supported by a grant from the Graduate School, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. (DD)

Expanded version of a paper presented before the Applied Linguistics Section of the South Central Modern Language Association Convention, Memphis, Tennessee, 1970. (DD)

A description of the pragmatic functions of word order in the Bantu language, Sesotho, and of how children begin to produce them illustrates the developmental trends characterizing Sesotho-speaking children's learning of different word orders. It supports findings from previous language acquisition studies that have indicated that children tend…

Attempts to show that the comparison of language structures may be relevant to diachronic linguistics, and in particular to areal linguistics. The article is based on an ongoing comparative study aimed at devising a typology of African languages. (Author/RM)

Chafe's theory of generative semantics, which uses spoken language for illustration, can be applied to American Sign Language in two ways: to combat the erroneous assumption that sign languages simply represent spoken language in visible form and to explain various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language. (MSE)

Study was an attempt to explain the observed difference associated with sentence type in the performance of children and the absence of a similar difference in the performance of college students. (Author)

This discussion of universe-scope relations in Chinese and Japanese provides a contrastive analysis of certain features in the two languages. A striking similarity in the deep structure of the noun phrase in both languages is noted and discussed in detail. Both languages have two constituents in a noun phrase which have a semantic relationship…

Examination of business letters in English, French, and Japanese, focusing on prescriptive accounts in the respective languages, found that, despite amazingly similar surface characteristics, American business letters were reader-oriented, French business letters were writer-oriented, and Japanese business letters were oriented to the space…

The author aims: (1) to show that generative phonology uses essentially the method of internal reconstruction which has previously been employed only in diachronic studies in setting up synchronic underlying phonological representations; (2) to show why synchronic analysis should add the comparative method to its arsenal, together with whatever…

A detailed view of the various uses in Russian of the conjunction "poka" is developed in this article. Frequent examples illustrate clausal relationships, negative constructions, aspect, and tense in typical "poka" constructions. The principal function of "poka" is related to the linguistic concept of simultaneity, and the standard dictionary…

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)

Supports the claim that aspect in English and written Arabic is a function of a variety of sentential elements including verb form, verb class, and adverbials. The two languages are basically similar in regard to two universal aspectual distinctions: syntactic categories and semantic categories. (TR)

This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different…

A taxonomy of revision changes was developed and applied to 18 case studies of writers' revisions. Subjects were six inexperienced student-writers, six advanced student-writers, and six expert adult-writers. The primary distinction of the taxonomy was between surface (formal and meaning-preserving) revisions and text-base (microstructure and…

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)