Ways in which the notion of causation is expressed in written British English are examined in a study that collected 130 different expressive devices. The use of causative conjunctions was found to be the most frequent of eight major ways of marking causation, closely followed by causative adverbs. (21 references) (Author/LB)

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

The aim of this study is to discuss the interaction of linguistic complexity and morpho-syntactic development in foreign language learners. The analysis of morpho-syntactic structures was carried out within the framework of Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998). To capture the level of complexity we investigate the following: sentence length,…

THE NEBRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER'S STUDY OF THE SYNTAX OF CHILDREN'S WRITING ATTEMPTED TO ASCERTAIN (1) THE PROGRESSIVE NUMBER OF SENTENCE UNITS WRITTEN BY STUDENTS IN GRADES TWO THROUGH SIX, (2) LEVELS OF STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY IN CHILDREN'S WRITING, (3) SYNTACTIC PATTERNS OF THIS COMMUNICATION, (4) WHETHER OR NOT COMMON CHARACTERISTICS…

THE SECOND PHASE OF THE SYNTAX STUDY OF CHILDREN'S WRITING, CONDUCTED BY THE NEBRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER, CONCENTRATED ON DISCOVERING AND EVALUATING THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CONTROL GROUPS WHICH DID NOT USE THE NEBRASKA ENGLISH CURRICULUM AND EXPERIMENTAL GROUPS WHICH DID. ANSWERS WERE SOUGHT TO THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS--(1) HOW DOES THE…

THE THIRD PART OF THE NEBRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER'S ANALYSIS OF THE SYNTAX OF CHILDREN'S WRITING FOCUSED UPON (1) HOW THE SYNTAX OF THIRD- AND SIXTH-GRADERS COMPARED WITH THAT OF PROFESSIONAL WRITERS, (2) WHETHER OR NOT THE RATE OF GROWTH IN CERTAIN SYNTACTIC SKILLS VARIED SIGNIFICANTLY AMONG GROUPS OF CHILDREN IN VARIOUS LANGUAGE ARTS…

One hundred fifty children in first, second, and third grade participated in a study of the relationships between written language variables in narrative and expository writing and reading comprehension. The seven written language variables investigated included mean length of T-unit and the ratios of various sentence-combining transformations to…

Excerpted from a text dealing with narrative semiotics now in preparation. (DD)

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)…

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…

Concludes that readers recall syntactic subjects very poorly. Suggests that to understand more precisely how readers represent such subjects in memory, new and rich models of language and of possible domains in text will be needed. (FL)

Analyzes in detail the expressions used by 39 grade school children explaining--in writing--the rules of a ball game. The analysis focuses on the linguistic strategies employed to define the actors and the actions of the game and establishes correlations between these strategies and the sociocultural background of the writers. (MES)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

Even English speakers do not always know when to use a hyphen. Examples are given of some fairly clear-cut cases where the hyphen should be used, leading to the formulation of some usable rules. (IFS/WGA)