IN THIS SECOND VOLUME (CHAPTER V) OF A THREE-PART SERIES ON HAUSA SYNTAX, THE EMPHASIS IS ON THE FUNCTION RATHER THAN THE FORM OF WORDS. (THE FIRST VOLUME DISCUSSES SYNTAX AND THE THIRD DEALS WITH SPECIFIC TEXTS.) IN ADDITION TO THOROUGH TREATMENT OF THE PARTICULAR HAUSA FUNCTION WORDS, A SMALL GROUP OF WORDS WITH FREQUENT OCCURRENCE AND HIGHLY…

IN THIS EXPERIMENT ERRORS WERE SYSTEMATICALLY INTRODUCED INTO A SERIES OF SENTENCES TO STUDY THEIR EFFECT ON RECOGNITION AND RECALL OF THE SENTENCES. THE SUBJECTS, 32 ADULTS, WERE SHOWN SLIDES OF SENTENCES CONTAINING A SINGLE ERROR ("THE IMPATIENT COMPOSED A SYMPHONY FOR THE ORCHESTRA") AS WELL AS CONTROL SENTENCES WITHOUT ERRORS. THE VIEWING TIME…

The author feels that although the problem of pronominalization and of reference in general is at the very heart of syntactic investigation, transformational grammarians are unable to deal adequately with these problems. He finds their theory of referential indices (Chomsky, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax") "completely beyond…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…

This paper is a syntactic analysis of standard French negation. The following expressions are described in detail: (1)ne...pas(point), (2)nullement (aucunement), (3)plus, (4)jamais, (5)pas encore, (6)guere, (7)rien, (8)personne, (9)aucun(e), (10)nul(le), (11)ni...ni..., (12)nulle part, (13)que, (14)pas un(e), (15)nul. The negative expressions are…

This paper is a study of the subclassification of English verbs in generative grammar. It is intended to discuss the subclassification of English verbs in terms of complement types and to investigate the problem of nonlocalization in complement constructions. Some verbs permit a "whether"-complement or a "that"-complement if…

The author of this paper argues that, in the study of current usage, we need to supplement data from corpus studies by using methods that elicit use, reports of use, and evaluations of use on items which interest them. Ten methods for experimental elicitation of such data are described, related to one another, and illustrated with examples of data…

Three different experiments were conducted to examine several variables that influence the recall of prose. In Experiment I a study was made of the influence of differing imagery level nouns as the subject and object of the preposition of a sentence; it also provided a further test of the conceptual peg model, i.e., the concrete-concrete-subject…

This article attempts to refute D.M. Perlmutter's claim that the syntactic component in Spanish grammar can generate structures that are grammatical at the deep structure level but not at the surface structure level, and that it is necessary to impose a surface structure constraint (SSC) as a filter to reject the ungrammatical structures. The…

In order to study the relationship of certain syntactic variables to reading comprehension difficulty, 80 high school seniors were asked to read and then paraphrase 16 types of relative clause sentences to demonstrate their understanding of the sentences. Each sentence included one independent clause and one relative clause, and each lacked any…

The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

This test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship existing between sentences that are similar in specific semantic content but different in syntactic structure. The test consists of twenty-five items of the three-option multiple-response type, with the stem of each item being a "pattern" sentence to be matched with one of the three…

Sentences in rhetoric texts were used in this study to determine a way in which thetorical syntactic parallelism can be analyzed. A tagmemic analysis determined tagmas which were parallel or identical or similar to one another. These were distinguished from tagmas which were identical because of the syntactic constraints of the language…

In order to discern whether sixth grade students with differing levels of reading achievement (as measured by the Paragraph Meaning subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test) also differed in the level of syntactic maturity evidenced in their response to a sentence combining task, a syntactic structure inventory of eight sentence-combining stimulus…