A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The paper demonstrates the possibility of deriving, from the Correlational Grammar developed solely for the purpose of automatic sentence analysis, a classification of words that could be useful in language analysis and language teaching. A group of some 90 frequent English adjectives serves as example; they are sorted into ten classes according…

The value of a transformational model of syntax can be illustrated by comparing the taxonomic grammatical description of a complex sentence to a transformation-oriented description of the same sentence. The taxonomic approach, an immediate constituent analysis, requires 10 steps to break the sample sentence into its grammatical components; the…

The aim of this paper is to account for some semantic properties of Romanian interrogatives "ce" and "cine" by establishing some definite correlations between various contextual restrictions governing the use of these interrogative particles and the "meaning" which might be assigned to each of these particles in any…

To determine the normal sequence of the development of Spanish phonology and Spanish grammatical patterns in the speech of native Spanish speakers, ages 2-5, a study of the acquisition of interrogative formation was undertaken. Two male and two females from each of nine age intervals between two and five were selected as informants; all were…

This research concerns the distinction between processes in sentence comprehension and those in sentence memory. Comprehension was monitored by timing subjects while they decided whether a sentence is true or false. The memory process was tapped by examining subject's incidental memory for the sentences they previously verified. The verification…

This guide is designed to sensitize both the novice and experienced teacher to the problems Vietnamese students are likely to have in learning the grammatical structures of English. The guidelines and suggestions presented here relate principally to the structures of English which differ markedly from parallel structures of Vietnamese, and which…

There is a class of verbs in French which require that their complement verb be in the indicative. However, if the matrix clause contains a negative or an interrogative, the complement verb is usually in the subjunctive, but sometimes in the indicative. Examples are the verbs "penser" and "croire" in sentences such as: 1) Elle…

A history of theories of transformational generative grammar is presented, and four theories are characterized as: Chomsky's initial theory, Chomsky's standard theory, the semantically-based theory, and finally Chomsky's nonstandard theory. The main issue appears to be the question of what determines sentence meaning. Specifically, it is stated…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…

Differences between formal constraints on a generative grammar and concepts of efficiency in transforming sentences provide different expectations regarding performance measures if the grammar is taken as a psychologically real model. To contrast these views, subjects were given sentences varying in voice, mood, and modality and asked to transform…

The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

This study reflects the author's efforts to synthesize ideas drawn from various linguistic theorists, especially Schlesinger, Chomsky, and Fillmore. The first section gives the theoretical background for the study. The second section discusses roles, relations, and constructs. The final section discusses the applications of the study to teaching…

The beginning reading progress of children may be linked to sentence structures used in reading textbooks and the syntax of the child's oral language. An investigation was made of the preprimers and primers of three major publishing companies and of Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development (SWRL) reading programs to…

An attempt to predict reading difficulty with various grammatical measures showed that the relatively crude measure of sentence length is still the most indicative. Yngve's phrase structure measurement and Allen's "sector analysis" were used on 80 selected passages and were compared to the Lorge Readability Formula in terms of tests based on the…