Two psycholinguistic processes are examined in a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment. Tests were conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from one population. With ambiguous lexical items all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to memory. (SC)

Evidence is presented that the Sentential Subject Constraint presented by Ross in "Constraints on Variables in Syntax" is a global constraint which makes reference to surface structure and to earlier stages of a derivation. (SC)

There are three dominant conceptions of functional sentence perspective (FSP): (1) a sentence should be analyzed into several segments, each having a different degree of what is called communicative dynamism; (2) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the theme and the rheme; and (3) a sentence should be analyzed into two segments, the…

Analysis of the deep structure of certain Tagalog sentences reveals buried agents. In Tagalog, verbs are inflected for the case role of the subject Noun Phrase (NP). However, Tagalog contains many sentences which, on the surface, do not appear to adhere to this rule, because they are missing the agent. Among sentences which deviate from the rule…

The principal claim of this paper is that the Japanese passive consists of two different constructions, each derived from a distinct deep structure and each having associated with it a distinct set of syntactic and semantic properties. One of these constructions, the "adversative passive," implies that the grammatical subject of the…

The purpose of this monograph is to provide a basic discussion of the general nature of syntactic complexity. The monograph describes how the rules of language produce syntax and raises some questions about reading difficulty. The contents include: "Arrangement," which discusses 12 basic sentence types, noun determiners, verb expansions, negative…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine if training in syntactic structures would increase reading performance of junior high school students. A total of 46 students in a predominately white middle class suburban school district who were reading at least two years below grade placement were divided into two groups: 24 students were…

This preliminary investigation grew out of the Project English study of written composition at the University of Georgia from 1963 through 1968. Toward the end of that project, attention was given to possible relationships between the quality of written composition and certain syntactic measures in student writing produced in schools using the…

This research is the result of 10 weeks of field work in Taiwan during the summer of 1972. It consists of a description, analysis, and comparison of the morphologically marked causative verbs in Rukai, Bunun, Tsou, Anis, Seedig, and Saisiyat. The theoretical framework employed is a type of case grammar referred to as "lexicase," a…

The present study analyzes the "ing" forms that follow deictic verbs of movement, including "go,""come,""take,""bring," and "carry." Many examples are given to support the theory that the "ing" forms are not verbs or nouns, but rahter adverbials and that these adverbials are members of a class that refers to activities characterized by certain…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

The notions of recursiveness and deletion are discussed in the context of Chomsky's presentations of transformational grammar in "Syntactic Structures" and in the later work, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax." After consideration of word-recursion, coordinate-clause recursion, and subordinate-clause recursion, extensions to…

Proposes a simple grammar of modern English stressing the independence of grammar from the logical structure of sentences. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden. (TL)

This article discusses the nature of the syntactic-autonomy in French, that is, the absence of a correlation between the position of an element in a sequence of discourse and its relative function. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to sentences in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker. This model is compared with others. (Author/RD)