English language learners are often more grammatically accurate in writing than in speaking. As students focus on meaning while speaking, their spoken fluency comes at a cost: their grammatical accuracy decreases. The author wanted to find a way to help her students improve their oral grammar; that is, she wanted them to focus on grammar while…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

Background: Agrammatic speech can manifest in different ways in the same speaker if task demands change. Individual variation is considered to reflect adaptation, driven by psycholinguistic factors such as underlying deficit. Recently, qualitative investigations have begun to show ways in which conversational interaction can influence the form of…

Verbal elements in Cairene Arabic are investigated in the light of two opposing hypotheses, one stating that the elements constitute a unit, the other stating that each element is an independent predicate. (AM)

A discussion of the views of various linguists on the future tense in English, followed by a scheme for classifying expressions of futurity. To be continued in a future issue. (FB)

Explains how grammars and textbooks can present the formal tense relations of English in a concise, uncomplicated way. (PM)

This is a grammatical and semantic analysis of verb usage in French. The occurrence of verb stems and endings with associated adverbs is described, defined and diagrammed. (MLA)

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets…

At the beginning of this study a chart is given to illustrate the 13 basic verb forms of Dari (the term given to Persian spoken in Afghanistan). The verbs are then described individually in terms of their usage in sentences. The approach combines form and function to an extent not normally attempted in grammar. Two hundred forty-four verb…

This article presents recent representative structural, eclectic, transformational, and semantic analyses of the subjunctive. A different theory is presented that states that there is but a single common rule for the use of the subjunctive and the indicative in all of their occurrences, both in independent and main clauses. (Author/NCR)

The purpose of this journal is to provide useful exchange of information among Navajo teachers. The articles in this issue deal with Navajo linguistics. Kenneth Hale and Paul Platero present an analysis of the relative clause in Navajo. Part 1 analyzes relativization forms and formulates structural descriptions for relativization rules, with…

It is possible to apply the concept of surface-structure constraint to a particular area of Hungarian syntax. A surface-structure constraint, according to David Perlmutter, can be seen as a template which serves as a filter at some level after the transformational component. In the case of Hungarian cooccurrence of noun phrases and verbs in a…

A system for classifying English predicates into four families that account for all forms, moods, voices, and tenses is examined as an approach to teach grammar to students of English as a second language (ESL). It is suggested that by focusing on one family at a time, then building by combining these families, students can learn more readily to…

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…