New spellers, adults just beginning to learn to read and write, face daunting problems with English vocabulary. Teachers use varying approaches to help these students, including published lists of Words Most Frequently Used. This paper provides an inventory of words used in letters to syndicated columnist "Dear Abby" as published in a…

This study examined children's acquisition of language by means of correlating spoken words and observed objects and actions. The common sense view of word learning via observation applies easily to learning nouns for objects, but becomes problematic in the process of learning verbs. When they encounter novel verbs applied to observed situations,…

The linguistic philosophies of H. P. Grice and J. L. Austin are discussed, and ways of applying their ideas to learning activities for gifted students are suggested. Grice's work focuses on prerequisites for successful conversation, the cooperative principle, and features of conversational implicature. Austin's work analyzes the distinction…

Research in the active-passive verb relation has indicated that there is an interaction between syntactic form and verb semantics among children of preschool age. The present study examines the contribution of active-passive syntax and verb semantics to comprehension difficulty for preschoolers, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults. An additional…

Linguistic theories cannot always be successfully applied to language teaching, but this article advocates the use of the single-stem verb system in teaching Russian. This system simplifies both teaching and learning Russian verb conjugation. (CHK)

Establishes the considerations of factivity, or concern with truth-value, and fictivity, or concern with realizational status, as basic to the concept of modality. This makes possible the inclusion of factive and implicative verbs in the concept of modality, and clarifies semantic differences between the Russian and English modal auxiliary…

Compares the uses of the German Future I and Present tenses with the corresponding Russian tenses, which reflect the Russian verb aspect. In German the aspect plays a much smaller role. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

That "will" and "shall" are modal, not temporal, verbs is shown by their syntactic similarity to the modals and by the fact that they follow the same transformational rules as the modals. This example demonstrates the usefulness of transformational grammar in explaining grammatical relationships to students. (Text is in…

Distinguishes between "mode" as a verb-form and "modality," a category of meaning expressed mainly by lexical and syntactical means. Describes the subjunctive in Russian and German; a schematic summary shows both languages using the subjunctive for hypothesis and wish, but only German for indirect discourse. (Text is in…

Transformational analysis of verb phrases in English is discussed. More than 150 transformations are classified arising from 10 basic kernel strings. See FL 508 197 for availability. (RM)

The subjunctive in English is analyzed, based on plays of Beaumont and Fletcher from the Early New English period. See FL 508 197 for availability. (RM)

Two experiments are reported in which subjects judged whether pairs of words viewed simultaneously contained the same stem morpheme. Reaction times for making these judgments are discussed. (Author/RM)

The modally unmarked verb forms may be constructed individually, according to a set of familiar principles, from grammatical elements within each inflectional order. A distinction between semological and grammatical units is important to such description and prediction. (MSE)

This analysis concentrates on stokavic texts up to 1600, and attempts to explain the transposition of pronominal and verbal enclitics in this dialect. (CK)

A contrastive analysis investigating points of interference experienced by native speakers of German learning Russian. Special attention is given to aspect. (Text is in German.) (TL)