This report contains an extensive discussion of an approach to the study of discourse. Initial remarks concern arguments for studying discourse and approaches for discourse study that have been used; the author then discusses the relationship of discourse analysis and generative semantics. Language is considered on two issues: the decisions that a…

The distinction between artifact and tool is introduced into the study of language diversity and the posting of linguistic universals. A complicating factor in all language investigations is the use of language as the chief tool to create new language. Analogy and metaphor are considered as two major creative forces at work in all languages.…

"How does a child come to be able to relate his own experience to the formal means of communicating about that experience in the language to which he is exposed?" The author maintains that the innate predispositions that underlie the development of the cognitive ability to organize and structure experience also underlie the acquisition of the…

This paper focuses on the two main schools of thought concerning the structure of Black English and its relationship to other dialects. One approach is that of the social dialectologists who claim that Black English shares features and origins of white non-standard Southern speech; the frequency with which specific features occur in actual speech…

The system described in this report is designed for use as a computational tool that allows a linguist to develop and study methods for generating surface strings from an underlying semantic structure. Initial findings with regard to form-determiners (such as voice, form, tense, and mood), some rules for embedding sentences, and some attention to…

This volume contains the papers presented at a workshop which brought together authorities from several different disciplines, each working in the area of natural language analysis, to participate in intensive, technical discussions of the issues involved in developing adequate grammars and semantics of natural languages. The disciplines…

The acquisition of Standard English by speakers of other languages and by speakers of non-standard dialects seems to differ (1) in motivation, (2) in the perception of Standard English, (3) in the social significance of Standard English, (4) in the cultural heritage and its influence on man's identity and self-respect, (5) in the source…

This project seeking to develop sound methodological research techniques for second-language is based on an initial pilot study which (1) identified and classifies the utterances of a child learning Spanish as a second language, and (2) determines whether there are any significant trends in the observed order of learning of kernels and transformed…

Through an experiment investigating the processes used by several speakers of Asian languages to decode passages by speakers of Australian English, this paper seeks to establish and categorize the types of problems encountered by multilingual speakers when decoding the speech of monolingual speakers in one of their (the multilinguals') second…

This report describes work on a pilot system for a fully automatic, high-quality translation of German scientific and technical text into English and gives the results of an experiment designed to show the system's capability to produce quality mechanical translation. The areas considered were: (1) grammar formalism, mainly involving the addition…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…

This article reports the results of research carried out in London using five-year-old children of working class and middle class backgrounds. Speech samples were collected and compared on the basis of grammatical categories. It was discovered that working class children used more pronouns than their middle class counterparts in third person…

The use of case frames of verbs as a control for the teaching of vocabulary items has a number of distinct advantages over other controls. The case frame associated with a particular vocabulary item, or with a particular semantic class, would be the same in the native and the target language (English). This would have the advantage of allowing the…

This paper explains the main concepts of communicative grammar and provides a detailed view of how communicative grammar analyses language at various levels. Language is discussed in terms of communication; the central elements in the analysis are those that carry information. Communicative grammar seeks to describe the process of the linguistic…

This paper seeks to underline the importance of at least acknowledging the existence of a complex set of rules in a grammar of social interaction--and the further reality that while there may be a grammar of social interaction, there are also grammars of social interaction for different groups. It should be possible to find that apparently…