The purpose of this paper is to show that: (1) language universals have much to offer to students of contrastive linguistics, and (2) in order to make contrastive analysis more meaningful, one ought to go beyond cataloguing mere contrastive structure statements and capture underlying structural tendencies. Some characteristics of word order in…

This paper discusses the use of pop, rock, and folk music in foreign language teaching. Modern music represents an idiom familiar to a broad span of young people, and has an important place in the life of students ranging in age from ten to thirty-five years of age. It also tends to follow and comment on the important trends of modern society.…

This report is a detailed empirical examination of Suppes' ideas about the syntax and semantics of natural language, and an attempt at supporting the proposal that model-theoretic semantics of the type first proposed by Tarski is a useful tool for understanding the semantics of natural language. Child speech was selected as the best place to find…

This comparative study of traditional and transformational approaches to the syntax of standard Russian proposes the superiority of analysis in terms of possible and impossible transformations, thereby revealing the existence of a level of linguistic form superior to that of simple morphophonemic description. Five classes of word-combinations of…

This report presents a general study of the structure of Dravidian languages, nothing predominant and significant patterns and similarities among the languages in the areas of phonology, morphology, and syntax. There is also a discussion of the main differences of various subgroups or particular languages from the typical patterns. Background…

This paper is concerned with the syntactic problems raised by the grammatical phenomenon in Japanese that is called here the "complementizer." In the types of sentences under consideration here, S2 is a nominal clause. Such a clause acts as a noun phrase adjunct to the verb in S1. The noun clauses in question are often followed by a…

The notion of language dependency presupposes that there is a hierarchy of languages in a multilingual society, and that each language is assigned a functional role in a multilingual individual's restricted or extended spheres of linguistic interaction. In South Asia, language dependency has resulted in linguistic convergence of two types: (1)…

The PLS-4 (Preschool Language Scale, 4th edition) is a psychometrically sound instrument constructed to assess language skills in children from birth to 6 years 11 months. It is a useful diagnostic and research tool that can be used to identify current comprehension and expressive language skills and can measure changes in language skills over…

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…

The active/passive system of English grew out of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) system where the fundamental distinction was between active and middle voices. The middle voice included within its functions the relationship that now would be known as passive. The PIE voice system is preserved in ancient Greek and Sanskrit, and in the former, the…

A common assumption underlying cross-linquistic studies in child language is that the comparison of any feature in unrelated languages may simplify semantic-grammatical complexities in a way that studies on a single language cannot. This paper begins by discussing the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes in Spanish by four…

This investigation studied the development of the form and function of negative sentences, and how it relates to the input on negation that children receive from their parents. The data came from three children: two from a previous study (Bellugi) and one the son of the investigators. A detailed analysis was carried out of the syntactic form and…

This study considers the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors (social and cognitive) in children's production of coordinate structures involving conjunction reduction. Two aspects of pragmatic context were considered: (1) the pattern of uncertainty or redundancy in a complex action sequence, and (2) the perceptual grouping of objects…

The need for an index of development by which second language proficiency could be expediently and reliably guaged has been acknowledged by both second language (L2) teachers and researchers. In two previous L2 studies, the search for an index of development centered on an examination of learner written performance. In an attempt to construct an…

This book is meant to serve as a guide to more efficient language teaching. Although it is based on theories both from standard audiolingual theory and cognitive-code learning, the basic objectives remain those of the audiolingual approach. The book focusses on the teaching of grammar and on the most efficient way to use drills in the classroom in…