The role of court judges as linguists is discussed. Linguistic issues arise in courts when lawyers attempt to convince a court that a statute, insurance policy, or contract should be interpreted as favoring their own client's interests, with respect to resolving a dispute that depends on the proper construal of a particular document. An…

In order to determine the knowledge and skills needed by novice programmers to successfully learn computer programming, four studies were conducted using a clinical interview technique. The first study determined that many systematic errors in programming were due to programmers' high-level misconceptions of the nature of the computer and of the…

A group of syntactic studies, primarily concerning English and German, within the framework of generalized phrase structure grammar include: "English Adverb Placement in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar" (Belinda L. Brodie), concerning the placement of modal, evaluative, temporal, and verb phrase adverbs; "Syntactic Conditions on Two Types of…

A language-specific test-item is one which includes a distractor which is a predictable mistake made by Persian speakers, and determined by syntactic and lexical contrastive analysis of Persian and English. The term 'universal' is used for a test-item which does not contain contrastive distractors as defined here. (Author)

This article presents a novel AAC communication aid based on semantic rather than syntactic schema, leading to more natural message construction. Users interact with a two-dimensional spatially organized image schema, which depicts the semantic structure and contents of the message. An overview of the interface design is presented followed by…

Urges the combination of grammatical instruction with pragmatic spoken usage in the teaching of language. (LG)

Conclusion of an article begun in "linguistik und Didaktik," v4 n16 1973. (DD)

Scientific discourse is difficult to read because of its lexical, syntactic, semantic, and logical features. This paper discusses each of those features, giving special attention to syntax, and suggests ways in which discourse analysis can be used to teach content reading in sciences and to rewrite scientific text for instructional purposes. Some…

Syntax in four published series of elementary school readers was analyzed to discover patterns of complexity increasing from first to sixth grade, to identify structures accounting for differences across the grades, and to compare the frequency of specific structures among the series. Analyses of 16 surface structures representing complexities…

Two fundamental assumptions guide this survey of recent research on anaphora. The first is that anaphoric expressions do not refer to segments in a text or discourse, but to entities that are assumed to be in the language receiver's mind. The second assumption is that a text serves to suggest the referents for anaphora, as does the nonlinguistic…