This paper offers a functional explanation for the existence and for the special properties of movement rules in natural languages. The hypothesis is advanced that raising, lowering, and fronting rules all serve the function of increasing the prominence of objective content in surface structure. (CK)

Most linguistic theory is analytic in that it begins with a complex unit and breaks it down into components. Criticisms of analytic linguistics are made, and a synthetic approach is proposed which begins with atomic components of language and rules for grouping them into more complex units. (RM)

An explanation is offered of aspect in imperative verb forms and in certain infinitive verb forms in Russian. Three presuppositions or conditions of appropriateness are postulated and their correlation to the aspect of an imperative or infinitive form discussed. (RM)

An examination of various linguists' definitions of parataxis, asyndeton, and juxtaposition shows that the concepts are often varying and lack precision. The author offers new definitions which distinguish three specific cases. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

Seeks to formulate a definition of imperativity based on extralinguistic rather than formal notions. (TL)

This study, part of an on-going investigation, analyzes the syntactic aspects of code-switching. A series of empirical studies has confirmed that there are only two general linguistic constraints where code-switching may occur, the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. This study describes in formal terms how the two constraints…

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 pragmatic approach to the problem of teaching the uses of the definite article in English to students of English as a foreign language is presented. The discussion deals with--(1) the situational context as a determining factor for the definite article; (2) the role of the linguistic context; (3) the determining role of restrictive phrases and…

This paper attempts to show that traditional generative phonology as formulated by Chomsky and Halle (1968) fails to account for the optional dropping of the schwa in French, and attempts to formulate a theory which can account for this phenomenon. The crucial factor governing the schwa-dropping process is the number of consonants preceding the…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

Two approaches to the problem of determining the illocutionary force(s) of a sentence are examined: Gordon and Lakoff's (1971) "Conversational Postulates," and Fraser's (1973) "On Accounting for Illocutionary Forces"; their relation to Searle's conditions is discussed. It is argued that Gordon and Lakoff's analysis can be…

Chomsky and Halle claim that an orthography based on their underlying phonological representations (UPR) of lexical items would be optimal for English. This paper challenges two of Chomsky and Halle's basic phonological assumptions: (1) that their Vowel Shift Rule is valid, and (2) that derived words do not appear as wholes in the lexicon. A less…

Four hypotheses concerning the linguistic structure of yes-no questions and their answers are considered as hypotheses relating to the abstract structure of yes-no questions and to this abstract structure in all human languages. The universal base hypotheses are the following: (1) The abstract representation of all yes-no questions includes two…