In order to study the complexity of sentence combining in college students, 32 students from five basic composition courses were asked to perform three writing tasks at three distinct times during the eight-week instructional period. Each student was asked to rewrite a passage of kernel sentences, to write a composition in the argumentative mode,…

Students' abilities in manipulation and control of syntax may be increased through a sequence of instruction involving the use of exercises termed "Non-Sentence Practice,""Nonsense-Sentences Practice," and "Syntactic Patterning Practice." The final step in the instruction sequence is to make the syntactic exercises pertinent to students' writing…

Three papers from this issue of the Working Papers are provided here. "The Nesting Constraint in Child Language," by Patrick Alan Brogan, discusses a child's ability to perform complex, internally embedded sentences. It is hypothesized that difficulty stems from a child's limited short-term memory. "A Framework for Studying Kin Term…

This paper is concerned with the treatment of anaphoric phenomena in a semantically based transformation grammar. It is argued that account of anaphora in terms of coreference are no better than accounts in terms of identical NPs; instead, it is proposed that a unified account of anaphora, which covers both quantified and unquantified NPs, may be…

This article describes phonological and semantic characteristics associated with the surface structure of some Japanese sentence intonations. The aim of the long-term study is to show the place of intonation in the total system of Japanese grammar. This particular part of the study is limited to the group of intonations which are characterized by…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

This dissertation examines relative clauses in Spanish. The introduction compares various characteristics of Spanish and English relative clauses, while chapter 1 contrasts restrictive and appositive relative clauses. The question of which relative forms should be generated by the grammar in both types of clauses is considered. Chapter 2 handles…

This paper presents a comparative study of English and Vietnamese syntax. Four basic patterns are said to make up the majority of English sentences: statements (both affirmative and negative), questions (both affirmative and negative), requests, and commands. The composition of each English pattern is discussed with examples, and compared directly…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of varying the semantic content of active and passive sentences along a dimension of "personalness" on the comprehension of those sentences by preschool age children. The study focuses on a current linguistic controversy dealing with the relative adequacy of syntax-based and…

Papers dealing with syntactic evidence in various languages for a higher performative sentence containing information about speaker, addressee and the speech act involved are reviewed and discussed. Arguments for this analysis have the form of showing that overt sentences behave in some way as if they were subordinate to a higher sentence…

This paper examines the various syntactic and semantic functions of the "ada" verb of "being" in Malay. The claim is made that there is an abstract uppermost "ada" in the underlying structure of Malay sentences that asserts or denies the truth of the surface main clause. A further claim is made that the…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

The first section of this paper discusses recent writing research and the basic elements of language development. The second section describes a program which used a sentence-combining method as an activity-based experience for language development. A six-month study involved all fourth graders at Powell School in Mountain View, California. The…

The ninth volume in this series contains seven articles dealing with various aspects of English - Serbo-Croatian contrastive analysis. They are: "A Note on Modifiers of Comparatives in English and Serbo-Croatian," by Wayles Browne; "Superlative Structures in English and Their Correspondents in Serbo-Croatian," by Vladimir Ivir; "Semantic Aspects…

The problem of determining the nature of this special form-class is seen in historical, linguistic perspective. A syntactic definition of predicatives as a word class with five types of morphological variation is included. The establishment of a word class or subclass on such a syntactic basis is suggested. (RL)