The present experiment with retarded and normal readers was designed to test comprehension across major segmental boundaries, an aspect of syntax raised by generative grammars, and to relate the comprehension problem to other correlates of reading retardation by choosing a problem in which ordering strategies may be adopted. (Author/KC)

The justification for Kean's (EJ 165 107) analysis of agrammatism as a phonological disorder rests on a certain specific theory of the structure of human language faculty, which is summarized. Simply proposing a competing analysis based on a distinct theory does not falsify the hypotheses. However, Kean's claims are subject to empirical…

Argues that the fundamental word order of Mandarin Chinese is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and describes word order change from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese. (AM)

Examines constituent order in Haida sentences. (AM)

Reports on an experiment in native speaker judgement of acceptability, designed to test the acceptability of variations on the time-manner-place order in German adverbs. Implications for teaching German are drawn. (AM)

In open-ended and forced-choice situations, subjects were asked to interpret phrases containing superficially incompatible adjective pairs. The results demonstrate that English speakers implicitly understand proposed linguistic principles underlying prenominal adjective ordering. (SW)

Reviews the grammatical, semantic, and stylistic difficulties in translating English passive constructions into French. (AM)

Examines reflexivization in Italian and demonstrates that the proposals that (1) reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates, and (2) the specified subject and tensed-S conditions, cannot be maintained as universals. (AM)

Discusses the referential meanings of nouns within discourse with emphasis on their anaphoric role from one phrase to another. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Questions the thesis that the emphatic English "do" can only be analyzed in terms of discourse context, as opposed to sentence structure. (Text is in French.) (AM)

This article presents evidence supporting the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English and other languages, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Also discussed is the challenge that binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct…

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

In two experiments, we explore how recent experience with particular syntactic constructions affects the strength of the structural priming observed for those constructions. The results suggest that (1) the strength of structural priming observed for double object and prepositional object constructions is affected by the relative frequency with…

A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to…

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…