Examines the age at which and the form in which children produce speech acts which commit them to a future action. Results revealed that all of the four- to 11-year-olds produced directive speech acts, but only the older children used the explicit performative verb "promise" to reassure the hearer of their commitment. (Author/CB)

Spanish modal verbs may express necessity, obligation, probability, and possibility, in either their personal or impersonal modes. Analysis is based on examples of contemporary Madrid speech. Four modals, "poder,""deber (de)," tener que," and "haber que," are placed within a tripartite structure defined by…

Nearly all Russian verbs with shifting past tense stress without "-sja" will develop a pattern of stress with "-sja" that has either fixed end stress in all four past tense forms or has shifting stress. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the accentuation of two types of sentence in English: (1) straightforward intransitive sentences, and (2) intransitive sentences embedded in the frame "It's just NP noun phrase[ V verb[-ing." Modifications to Gussenhoven's (1983) Sentence Accent Assignment Rule (SAAR) are suggested based on large groups of exceptions of the SAAR.…

Problems in teaching French verb conjugation are traced to problems in morphological classification systems, and a new, descriptive approach using seven criteria is described and illustrated. (MSE)

Presents data that suggest that three factors--social variables, speech register, and linguistic variables--influence the choice of grammatical structure in Brazilian Portuguese where options exist to express the same idea. Examines the range of options used in responses that indicate general patterns of linguistic structures related to particular…

Describes a study of four- to five-year-old children's interpretations of statements involving "know" (savoir) and "think" (croire). The study tried to ascertain the language operations that modify a proposition or a basic assertion and to show the speaker's attitude towards the event asserted in the statement. (SED)

Discusses a general strategy for helping students acquire vocabulary, specifically how to master the vocabulary problem of "ser" and "estar." This is done by showing students, in interesting and recognizable ways, that English is sensitive to many of the same semantic differences of "ser" and "estar." (SED)

A relatively common way to establish a new verb is to give verbal form to a noun, but it also exposes some irregularities of the language, and the rules that govern it. Although this is largely a phenomenon of the twentieth century, evidence of it appears in Rabelais' work. (MSE)

Presents a system for teaching the Italian future tense by tracing its development from the Latin vulgar use of infinitive plus "avere" to indicate futurity. (AM)

Discusses regularities and peculiarities in the use of the modal verbs of obligation "must,""need" and "should," also of the non-modals "have (got) to" and "need to." Agreements and differences in the use of the verbs are shown, with examples. Use of the various tense-forms is discussed. (IFS/WGA)

Describes the purpose, structure and application of this monolingual verb lexicon, which indicates the morphosyntactic environments of the most common German verbs. Mention is made of the forthcoming valence lexicon. The book is for teachers and textbook writers. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

First examines German modal verbs with respect to multiple meanings and synonymy, finding that "implications," especially presuppositions, account for important differences in their uses. The same approach is used on French modals. Common features and differences are studied, and typical errors are predicted and classified. (Text is in…

This article discusses various definitions and uses of the Spanish verb "to contemplate." (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)