Verb nominalization in Navajo is a strategy by which children create category labels when the adult lexical item is not known; it allows for the creation of uniquely descriptive category labels. This study was based on a series of interviews with Navajo children aged four-and-a-half to approximately ten years, all native speakers of Navajo with…

The loss of the copula in Black English Vernacular (BEV) is demonstrably traceable to norms of pidginization that have their roots in West African languages and in contact among those languages. An extensive examination of the verb systems of a number of West African languages reveals that in every case a variety of verbal forms serves the many…

Intended to contribute toward the understanding of paragraph and discourse structure, this study is based on the Totonac language as it comprises the "most extensive and involved system of clauses" seen by the authors and because the generation of the 396 verbal types of this system from a kernel of 11 types is "very symmetric and…

Children's cognizance of linguistic selectional rules was studied in a controlled sentence production task. Forty-five third grade and 45 sixth grade children wrote noun responses in active and passive sentence frames in which only verbs and function words were given. The verbs varied in how animate nouns were required as both logical subjects and…

This book attempts to bring together semantic theory and description in order to provide the foundation of a unified "semantics of English." Part 1 is thus devoted to semantic theory and Part 2 to the description of some central fields of meaning in English. In Part 1, theory is developed involving two kinds of semantic analysis:…

This volume is the fourth in a series of detailed reports on a working computer program for the syntactic analysis of English sentences into their component strings. The report (1) records the considerations involved in various decisions among alternative grammatical formulations and presents the word-subclasses, the linguistic strings, etc., for…

A structural-functional basis for the construction of an English tense system is proposed. It is asserted that such a system will facilitate the teaching of English tense usage. (Author/RM)

Recommends the "distributional" and transformational grammar approach as especially suitable for developing a teaching grammar for dealing with the French simple infinitive and infinitive with "de". (IFS/WGA)

Examines a family of Spanish compounds formed by the combination of a third-person singular verb form with a following noun, and attempts to show the semantic categories of such compounds. It is argued that speakers of Spanish intuitively categorize unfamiliar "guarda" compounds according to their existing repertoires. (EJS)

Discusses the syntactic differences in expressing wishes or desires in Italian and Russian. (CFM)

Examines syntactic and semantic constructions of French verbs denoting and causing emotions; and lists these verbs according to infinitive, "active" adjective, and "passive" adjective. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A brief psychosystematic analysis of the problem of auxiliaries in French, and of the solution offered by the internal psychomechanism of the language as found in Gustave Guillaume's research. "Avoir" and "etre"" are studied in some detail from several aspects. There is a short bibliography. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Studies modality in the context of discourse analysis and an agent theory. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/AM)

This analysis examined twentieth-century Spanish American works, geographically distributed throughout the area and including all genres. Results are given by genre and by nation. (RM)