Stresses the importance of using action verbs to create imagery in writing effective news stories for student publications. (RB)

This instructional guide is to be used by teachers in the instruction of "Platero y Yo," written by Juan Ramon Jimenez, one of Spain's foremost poets. A systematic study is provided of movement throughout the text, by analyzing verb tenses, to help novice Spanish literature students grasp the scholastic and psychological interpretations of poetic…

The Macedonian verb form corresponding to the form ending in "-l" in French is examined, focusing on the active past participle, which represents the past indeterminate or non-testimonial tense. Special attention is paid to aspectual, modal, temporal, and prosodic values, and all examples are drawn from the two languages. (MSE)

The use of a model for treatment of English modals in a machine translation system being developed in Europe is discussed. The Eurotra system, sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities, is designed to translate into the nine official languages of the European Economic Community. The report first examines modality, the different ways…

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

It is proposed that the functions of the Mandarin verbal suffix "-le" are three: (1) for marking non-continual factual actions or events; (2) for indicating the "peak" in an event line; and (3) for explicitly marking anteriority of an action or event. Observations of written language drawn from newspaper articles and…

Examination of a small segment of French morphology involving the role of the final consonant illustrates the applicability of the natural morphology approach to linguistic analysis. Representative examples of modern French adjectival, verbal, and nominal word forms are subjected to analysis in terms of iconic, non-iconic, and counter-iconic…

The influence of maternal use of verbs upon a child's developing rule system for verb usage was examined. Previously reported data (Brown, 1983) on mother-to-child speech were analyzed. Thirteen different contexts for verb use were identified. There was a close resemblance between the way the child and his mother distributed their uses of verbs.…

Problems emerging from previous analyses of epenthesis in Japanese verbal endings are discussed and a crucial relationship between epenthesis and assimilation is argued. The focus is on the occurrence of /i/-epenthesis with certain root-final consonants. The analysis, which incorporates the view that assimilation is accomplished by means of…

English as second language (ESL) learners often avoid using the present perfect or use it improperly. In contrast with native speakers of English sampled from newspaper editorials, of whom 75 percent used the present perfect, only 22 percent of ESL college students used the present perfect correctly. This avoidance is due in part to lack of…

The role of the abstract triconsonantal root in the acquisition of Moroccan Arabic was investigated. Evidence from recorded speech samples of 32 Moroccan children between the ages of 3 and 6 is used to demonstrate that the abstract root plays a central role in both the nominal and verbal acquisition of the lexicon of Semitic languages and that the…

A study of the awareness of verb transitivity in the spontaneous speech of two two-year-old native speakers of Quiche was accomplished by examining three factors: transitive terminations given to verbs, subject markers on the verbs, and syntax. The first was studied by counting the number of transitive verbs used with both transitive and…

This study attempted to place children's language in its wider setting and considered the meanings the child can express in connection with the orms in which he expresses them. (Author/RK)

Evaluates tenses as to (1) communicative importance, (2) frequency, and (3) range. Under (1), finds actual tense less important than accompanying adverbials and extra-linguistic factors. Discusses chief difficulties appearing in use and interpretation of past tenses, and how the results of linguistic research may help to deal with them. (Text is…