Three colloquium papers are presented on two fields of linguistics, dialogism (the study of dialogue content) and polyphony (the representation of different sounds by the same letter or symbol). The first paper, by J. Moeschler, examines dialogism, dialogue, and polyphony from the perspective of the pragmatics of the utterance and the pragmatics…

An analysis of the nature of secondary predicates takes a comparative approach, using Italian and English. Distributional properties and extraction facts are accounted for, and an explanation for the fact that resultatives are not allowed in Romance languages is sought on the basis of Italian evidence. It is argued that the semantic distinction…

Three types of information useful to English as a Second Language teachers of Haitian refugees are provided: (1) a discussion of the Haitian educational system and of reasons for the high illiteracy rate; (2) an explanation of the language situation in Haiti where the official language is French, and the native language of most of the population…

The development of relative clauses in child speech was investigated using an elicited production task instead of spontaneous speech samples. In an elicited production task, the context is manipulated so that a complex sentence must be used for communication. Thirty-six English speaking children from 3 to 5 years old were provided with contexts…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Studies are reviewed on the spontaneous speech of mothers of hearing children and hearing impaired children of various ages. Results are reported according to six major topics (sample findings in parentheses): syntax (the syntactic complexity and length of maternal utterances uniformly increased with the age of the hearing children from infancy to…

This study investigated kindergarten, first, and second grade children's ability to make linguistic judgments about sentneces that were either correct or disrupted along semantic or grammatical lines. Sentences on the judgment task were created according to clearly specified rules utilizing grammatical features that could be transformed into…

Kindergarten and first-grade children participated in a study of the role of reciprocal and inversion reversibility in language acquisition and cognitive development. Subjects completed cognitive tasks assessing conservation, seriation, and class inclusion, and language tasks assessing the active-passive transformation and the negative…

Two experiments are presented to clarify the relationships among different information codes available to a fluent reader and the utilization of syntactic and semantic knowledge to facilitate word identification. Use of context is measured with a word boundary task on passages with either coherent or random organization. Orthographic pattern and…

The syntax of adult expressive language is compared to that of child pre-language. This "syntactical regression" is considered part of the dynamic and evolutionary character of human language. (Text is in French.) (AM)