The study analyzes, for readability and difficulty, the language of 50 commonly used application forms. The forms were compared with respect to length, readability, t-unit density, and word-length variables. Forms were also compared against two word-frequency lists. Results show that many of the words appearing often on forms do not appear on the…

This study investigated semantic aspects of children's language as it is related to emotional expression. Children's ratings of vocabulary items categorized as expressing happy, sad, loving, angry, confident, and scared feelings were examined in three different ways: in isolation, in verbal contexts, and accompanying pictures of emotional…

To investigate children's ability to make linguistic judgments, a 60-item Awareness of Acceptable Sentences task was constructed. This task and the reading subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test were administered to 144 children in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. Analyses of results indicated that children's performance on the…

This study attempted to determine if reading ability and grade level differences accounted for differences in the word associations and written syntactic structures of 180 selected students. The study also investigated the relationship of semantic associations and syntactic complexity. An oral, free word association test was used to measure…

Palauan is a relatively undescribed Austronesian language. This dissertation is an attempt to provide an account of the affixes which Palauan verbs can take, since there are complexities associated with almost every affix, with regard to both its phonological form and its syntactic and semantic function. In order to generalize about the verb…

An integrated analysis of the syntax and semantics of serial verb constructions (SVCs) in a group of West African languages is presented. With data from Dagaare and closest relatives, a structural definition for SVCs is developed (two or more lexical verbs that share grammatical categories within a clause), establishing SVCs as complex predicates.…

This dissertation abstract summarizes a research study which investigated the hypothesis that bilingualism in children would result in: (1) increased ability to analyze syntax; (2) acceleration in the time of arrival of the stage of concrete operational thinking; and (3) an increase in cognitive flexibility or ability to mentally shuffle material.…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

This study is concerned with the description of compound sentences, relative clauses, and complement clauses in Standard Persian within a generative-transformational grammar. Compound sentences are divided into conjunctive, disjunctive, and adversative types on the basis of the semantic relations they express. A conjunctive clause is either…

This work treats some of the important issues encountered in an attempt to synthesize natural sounding English speech from arbitrary written text. Details of the systems that interact in producing speech are described. The principal systems dealt with are phonology (intonation), phonetics, syntax, semantics, and text-view (discourse). Technical…

Phrasal verbs occur frequently in written and spoken English and may be difficult for non-native speakers to understand and produce, particularly when parts of the phrasal verb should be separated and when they should be adjacent. The study reported here analyzes natural data in context to determine whether the word order of the parts of a…

The objective of this thesis was to colligate the various strands of research in the literature of computational linguistics that have to do with the computational treatment of semantic content so as to encode it into a computerized dictionary. In chapter 1 the course of mechanical translation (1947-1960) and quantitative linguistics is traced to…

This paper proposes that some but not all "I" causatives in Korean are analyzable, and argues that case markers in Korean are not merely surface phenomena, but are semantically and syntactically significant. The types of Korean causatives are introduced, as well as the major problems involved in their analysis. Previous generative works…

This work is intended to find replies to practical questions, such as how well native speakers of Spanish are decoded by native speakers of English, which errors interfere with decoding by the listener, and what the implications of the study might be for teaching. Fifteen Chileans were asked to tell stories in English, and several panels of native…