Revised and expanded version of a paper read to the Fifteenth Annual Conference on Linguistics, New York City, March 14, 1970. (VM)

Parts of this paper were presented at the Psychonomic Society Convention, 1969. (VM)

Research supported in part by a research grant from the United States Office of Education to Cornell University. (DS)

The language of sportscasting is analyzed in terms of register variation, first by locating the register by successive approximations to a characterization of occasions of use, then by identifying syntactic characteristics: simplification, inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions, and routines. Sports announcer talk is described as a…

Investigates the question of T-unit length stability in informative discourse written by freshmen near the end of an intensive course in college writing. (HOD)

Discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent. Cites a study comparing the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers; concludes that syntactic maturity correlates with writing quality and that teachers should begin instruction by emphasizing syntactic skills. (RL)

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

Seeks to determine whether young children use different strategies than do adults in clausal processing. Subjects were 20 three year olds, 30 four year olds, 20 five year olds, and 30 undergraduate students. (MP)