It is argued here that English contains a distinct class of relative clauses called amount relatives. On the surface, these are much like restrictive relative clauses, but they have a syntax and semantics that align them more with comparatives than with restrictive relatives. (Author/KM)

Learned academies deplore the deterioration of Castillian Spanish due to foreign contamination. They ignore the real source of the problem within Spain itself where everyone speaks the language badly except those in the remote towns and a few intellectuals. A ray of hope comes from the Americans. (Text is in Spanish.) (AMH)

A general guideline is offered as a reference point to choosing the appropriate preposition (a or par) for French causative sentences with faire. Full noun phrase complements of infinitives are treated. (SW)

This study found that there are striking similarities between the pattern of interruptions in male-female interchanges and those observed in the adult-child transactions. (Author)

Finds that college students with high writing apprehension differed significantly from those with low apprehension of writing on both perceived message quality and actual structural characteristics of the messages they encoded. (Author/GW)

Discusses the factors which affect the transition children must make between the family's sociocultural context and the often quite different sociocultural context of the school. (MS)

This work represents an effort to develop empirical algorithms useful for measuring alliteration. The resulting rankings compare not unfavorable with an intuitive ranking. (Author)

Reports on a study investigating the contributions of visual factors dependent upon the use of symbols as intermediary units and concludes that perceptual factors may play an important role in the use of Chinese characters as intermediaries in introducing reading. (JM)

Reports research which shows that a wide gap exists between basal reader language and children's level of oral language development. (JM)

Analysis of two- to five-year-olds' (N=26) responses to queries regarding utterances they made during free play indicated that social context interacted with response type, demonstrating that the initial utterance had a role in response determination and was important to the contingent query sequence. (Author/CB)

Discusses various definitions of markedness in terms of second language acquisition and describes a study testing one such definition which found that second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in the second language but did accept double object construction and suggested that transfer took place only with one of two marked…

Posits two hypotheses arising from the great immigration to Sweden and the immigrants' use and learning of Swedish: (1) Swedish as used by immigrant children may show certain features, related to a creolization process; and (2) the Swedish language may in future show signs of influence from the varieties used by persons with immigrant background.…

Investigates (in two phases) how coherence is cued between turns in conversations. Indicates that (1) turns were consistently paired well beyond chance, suggesting that explicit cues to connections between turns in conversations do exist; and (2) only lexical devices were found significantly more often in coherent than incoherent pairs. (NKA)

In two studies involving seven developmentally disabled children aged 7-14, phonetic sounds and syntactic structures representing different levels of normal development were taught. Results showed that the children's sequence of learning language forms followed the normal developmental model (e.g., earlier emerging forms were acquired in fewer…