A three-year research project which will collect information on the grammar of British dialects is described. The project is part of a larger study of syntactic variation, undertaken to gain insight into the causes of and solutions to linguistic conflict in school. Information is to be gathered in selected schools from the speech of students 11-16…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether item difficulty is significantly affected by language difficulty and response set convergence. Language difficulty was varied by increasing sentence (stem) length, increasing syntactic complexity, and substituting uncommon words for more familiar terms in the item stem. Item wording ranged from…

A type of item used frequently in standardized testing involves the recognition of a sentence. Examples of such items are the sentence completion items, used in both the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and the sentence correction items used in the Test of Standard Written English. Tests that contain such…

It is proposed that LF-movement in in-situ questions is not adequate to express the scope distinctions basic to the semantic interpretations of the direct and indirect question dichotomy in Marathi and Kashmiri, because this question type is more constrained in these languages than in languages like Chinese and Japanese. This theory is illustrated…

A study analyzed four dyadic conversations for evidence of the signals operating in the turn-taking process and facilitating the smooth exchange of turns. It found over 20 syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features occurring frequently with turn-taking. The five most significant factors correlating with turn-taking were a prosodically completed…

This sourcebook contains a series of lesson plans for remediating pragmatic problems for students in preschool through grade six. Introductory material describes the concept and development of pragmatics (the ability to use language as a tool), provides an observation checklist for clinicians to use in identifying specific types of pragmatic…

Analysis of several texts simplified to teach reading comprehension to college second language students shows that simplification affects both textual cohesion and coherence. Moreover, simplification restricts the amount of significant semantic information and creates a more transparent pattern of reference. The use of cohesive conjunctions varies…

The papers collected here concern the interfaces between various components of grammar (semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology) and between grammar itself and various extragrammatical domains. They include: "The OSU Random, Unorganized Collection of Speech Act Examples"; "In and Out in Phonology"; "Forestress and…

A consulting physician's report on the physiological, social, and psychiatric states of an alcoholic patient, written for the attending physician and other interested parties, is analyzed for coherence. The need for coherence in the presentation of the complex interrelationships in the patient's social context is the primary focus of the analysis.…

Both sentence length and sentence complexity of various kinds of newspaper prose were examined in a study to determine (1) ways newspaper prose differs from the prose of books native English speaking students chose to read and enjoy reading and (2) whether there are features of newspaper prose other than vocabulary and a lack of international news…

Optimal-level theories maintain that the quality of affect is a function of a quantitative arousal potential dimension. An alternative view is that the quantitative dimension merely modulates preexisting qualitative properties and is therefore only responsible for changes in the degree of affect. Thus, the quality of affect, whether it is positive…

To examine the relationship between writers' knowledge of expository frames--conventions accepted by both writers and readers in association with a particular type of discourse--and writing skill, 60 persuasive essays were analyzed for content organization. The essays, evaluated as either above average or average on a high school writing…

A study compared the reading strategies in Spanish of three third-graders: two monolingual Spanish-speakers and one bilingual English-Spanish speaker. The Miscue Analysis Inventory was used for data analysis. Results indicated that the three readers performed below the proficient reader level, and their miscues followed similar patterns. The main…

A discussion of Italian comparatives of inequality examines the use of "che" and "di" in introducing the comparison. It begins by looking at and discounting the semantic explanation for the different structures and then outlines the comparative rules for use of "che" and "di." It examines regular and…

A study investigated whether young children use sentence accent to mark new information as systematically as they have been shown to handle contrastive stress within naturally-occurring discourse. Data were drawn from the spontaneous conversations of a boy-and-girl twin pair with adults. The twins' speech was coded in carefully-defined categories…