The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of…

This study is divided into two sections: the first examines Standard French indirect interrogation, noting several distinct verb classes which are discussed in terms of permutations of WH-words, reduction, multiple WH-words, cleavage, semantic compatibility, and the "que-" completive; the second part focuses on indirect interrogation and…

This reference grammar of Japanese is divided into thirty-one major sections: (1) notational conventions, including spelling, punctuation, accent, and juncture; (2) sentence construction: nuclear sentences and expanded sentences; (3) predicate adjuncts; (4) expansion constraints and noun subcategorization; (5) voice conversions; (6) nuclear focus…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether practice in transformational sentence combining will aid students' reading comprehension by giving them a large repetoire of syntactic constructions from which to draw when matching constructions contained in the materials they are expected to read. The first section of the document discusses the…

This workshop guide is designed to help civil service students both learn to use good grammar and develop their technical writing skills. Discussed are such topics as nouns, gender, number, person and case, appositives, pronouns, mood, verbs, (transitive and intransitive), adjectives and adverbs, comparisons, articles, conjunctions, infinitives,…

A detailed description of the syntax in the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Kindergarten stories is presented to aid in the formulation of comprehension assessment and instruction. The lexicon and surface structures of the sentences appearing in the stories were classified and tabled in terms of types of elements and functions. The new…

Constraining linguistic metatheory by demanding that it allow the construction of grammars for all the frequently occurring idiolects of standard American English is shown to narrow the choices among competing theoretical positions. In this way data from a nonhomogeneous speech community are used to illuminate rather than cloud a theoretical…

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…

The syntactic relationship between the quantifier and the noun phrase (NP) and the function of the quantifier in the sentence are studied. In the first part of the paper, the theories of several linguists concerning the structure of the NP that includes a quantifier are reviewed. In parts 2 and 3 a syntactic description of the quantifier is…

Syntax, or, loosely, sentence structure, is a major linguistic variable influencing the comprehensibility of every written sentence. This paper attempts to set forth the relationship between elements of syntax and reading comprehension as the classroom teacher might see them, and to propose a strategy, the Complete Linguistic Elements Paradigm…

Verbs (4800) from 1200 compositions written by Nebraska students (grades 3-6) were examined using the most sophisticated grammatical analysis available to determine children's use of the English verb system and to compare their use to recent studies of the verb in adult writing. Information obtained included the following items: Children used…

The purpose of this report is to describe a set of programs which either perform certain tasks useful in the generation of programed foreign-language instructional material or facilitate the writing of such task-oriented programs by other researchers. The programs described are these: (1) a PDP-10 assembly language program for the selection from a…

This book, written for students who have studied English as a second or foreign language for up to six years, aims to (1) correct the mistakes which even advanced students make, by demonstrating how native English writers use certain "tricky" structures, and giving the students practice in their correct usage; (2) improve the students' powers of…

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

The teacher can stimulate an appreciation of poetry in his students by selecting, reading aloud, and discussing only those poems to which he himself responds strongly. He can also develop students' enjoyment of poetry by encouraging them to bring in their own poetic discoveries and by alerting them to the many possible interpretations of a poem.…