A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

This paper is a response to Lavandera's question regarding the limits of the study of language variation. Sociolinguistics is characterized by its desire to limit representational meaning much more narrowly than formal linguistics. In addition while formal linguistics views language as species-specific and designed to accomodate logical…

A study of some reformulations in linguistic theory which have been brought about by a shift from generative to casual grammar. An attempt is made to integrate these transformations into one of the current sociolinguistic currents: the elaboration of a theory of speech production. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

The justification for the Chomsky-Halle Auxiliary Reduction Rule III, called Pretonic Stress Placement (PSP), is questioned from the point of view of the native speaker. The similarity of the PSP and the Main Stress Rule (MSR) is examined through the application of these rules to polysyllabic monomorphemic and polymorphemic words. This analysis is…

This assumption that non-standard speakers are limited in their linguistic ability is examined based on a larger study investigating the speech of working-class adolescents in Sydney, Australia's inner-city areas. Speech samples of four children are presented. An examination of verbal structures reveals that there is a predominance of simple…

After an extensive transformational consideration of the shift of indirect objects with "to" and "for," the authors introduce a theory of perceptual strategy which could be used to supplement transformational theory. According to a concept of perceptual strategy constraints on susceptibility, the strategy for interpreting a sentence involves…

This paper considers the way in which a grammar must account for the speaker's knowledge of sentence force as opposed to sentence form or meaning and the way in which this force is related to a sentence. According to the performative analysis approach, the force of each sentence should be stated explicitly as a part of the underlying…

The prenominal relative modifer construction (PREM) in German, while not a compulsory grammatical feature of the language, is a stylistic means of expression which native speakers use readily in non-casual speech and writing. Teaching the active use of this construction at the intermediate level of German study may be an effective means of helping…

Two major strategies for linguistically encoding an idea or proposition are suggested. The first strategy involves encoding an idea in the space of a single utterance, while the second strategy conveys the proposition through a sequence of two or more utterances. The tendency has been to focus on discourse as a composite of sentences (the first…

To determine the principal differences in syntactic structure between spoken and written American English, a corpus of the spoken (800 sentences) and written (280 sentences) utterances of six graduate students was described in terms of a transformational generative grammar. These utterances were used as a basis for a two-part grammar: (1) a source…

This is a study of the kinds of processes involved in learning the meaning of individual lexical items, and in particular how the acquisition of lexical meaning is related to the cognitive structuring of events on the one hand and the ability to produce syntactic paraphrases of a word's meaning and other related constructions on the other. It is…

The general goals of this study of Luo children in Kenya were (1) to provide a description of the acquisition of language in terms of categories acquired within the age range of 12-35 months; (2) to account for their linguistic competence in the generation of their language; and (3) to illustrate how social settings alter the linguistic…

The present level of understanding of the psycholinguistic processes and capacities underlying the child's acquisition of language is reviewed in this publication. In the first chapter, linguistic theories, biological characteristics of language learning, and the distinctions between language competence and language performance are discussed. The…

This paper describes a reading program researched, designed, and developed by Consultants in Total Education for primary students whose mother tongue is other than English. The program includes teaching strategies that trigger universal learning strategies. The program is divided into four general stages, each stage containing particular…