Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to compare the rates of using African American English (AAE) grammatical features in spoken and written language at different points in literacy development. Based on Kroll's model (1981), a high degree of similarity in use between the modalities was expected at Grade 3, and lower similarity was…

Writing and speaking are clearly related activities, but the acts of production are different. To what extent are the underlying processes shared? This paper reports three experiments that use syntactic priming to investigate whether writing and speaking use the same mechanisms to construct syntactic form. People tended to repeat syntactic form…

Reports on an analysis of the forms, strategies, and functions of complimenting in one genre of written discourse. It is argued that writers use complimenting discourse strategies to establish and maintain rapport and to mitigate both global and genre-specific face-threatening acts and that these social purposes help account for both their…

Second part of a continued article; number'' refers to the singular or plural of words. (SK)

Examines the structures present in the writing samples of bilingual respondents to written questions in Spanish in order to determine which forms represent a departure from standard Spanish; discusses the patterns that develop; and offers insights into the factors underlying this systemic departure from standard written Spanish. (26 references)…

Provides a synthesis of findings about lexical and syntactico-semantic differences between spoken and written language. Outlines and critically examines the major theoretical and methodological approaches used in comparative studies of spoken and written language and reexamines the question of how speech and writing relate to prototypical forms of…

Presents a contrastive statement of the potential that intonation has for differentiating identically worded syntactic patterns in English and German. Focuses on tonality, rehearses some well-known examples of tonality contrasts and introduces some less well-known ones as well, both of which provide examples of syntactic distinctions concealed in…

Keeping vocabulary and content constant, it was determined whether syntactically more complex structures increase reading difficulty or whether all students, regardless of grade level, have the same syntactic skills and thus read with equal facility materials written at different syntactic maturity levels. One hundred and twenty randomly selected…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

To determine the variety of syntactic patterns that potential English teachers would normally use and the possible differences in their oral and written discourse, 1000-word oral and written language samples were collected from 21 student teachers. These samples were divided into T-units and classified according to 23 sentence patterns based on…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…

TO DISPEL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH TEACHERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED BY THE LINGUIST. THE LINGUIST SEES LANGUAGE AS "A SYSTEM OF PATTERNED VOCAL BEHAVIOR BY MEANS OF WHICH MEN COOPERATE IN SOCIETY." BY USING RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC METHODS, HE STUDIES REPRESENTATIVE AND AUTHENTIC…

Samples of written language were collected from 140 congenitally deaf children at grade levels 3, 5, 7, and 9. The samples were then subjected to error, quantitative, and transformational analysis. Findings suggested a relationship between the order in which the deaf child acquires the rules of his language and the ordering of rules in a…

A study of the functions and structure of referential third- person pronominal chains in spontaneous English conversation as compared to those in written English is discussed. The study found the frequencies of these pronouns and of their chains to be generally much higher in the spoken corpus than in the written corpus. In the spoken corpus,…