An analysis of the syntax particular to newspaper writing, with emphasis on the use of the nominalization of verbs. The possible pedagogical uses of such an analysis are discussed. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The nature of the system of linguistic entities of a natural language is examined. The purpose is to define the relation between "le lexique" and an overall linguistic theory, the relation between form and meaning. (Text is in French.) (TL)

Considers two aspects of contemporary Russian language usage: (1) synonymity of prepositions, and (2) semantic and stylistic differences arising when certain verbs govern nouns in different cases. Material is excerpted from "Stilistik der russischen Sprache" (Russian Language Style) by Rosental and M. Telenkowa. (Text is in German.) (FB)

A production-based method of investigating children's understanding of deictic verbs is described. Use of "come/go" and "bring/take" by 4-7-year-olds is compared with Clark and Garnica's 1974 study. Data reveal different facts about verb acquisition processes and order. (CHK)

Discusses the fact that the conditional mood has wider distribution in Czech than in Russian as far as its meaning and use are concerned. An analysis of this phenomenon is proposed that makes use of many aspects and dimensions such as the relation between two propositions in an "if...then" construction, the "alternative…

Two experiments showed two-year-olds pairs of videotaped actions, one familiar and one novel, and asked them to select referents of novel verbs. For actions not involving objects, children tended to select the novel action over the familiar one in each of four experiments. For actions involving objects, novel actions were chosen more often than…

Results of 3 sentence-interpretation experiments involving 180 preschoolers suggest that very little explicit syntactic knowledge is needed to give children some structural clues to verb meaning. Sentence structure appears to have a meaning of its own that can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation. (SLD)

Shows how English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers can demystify the process of verb tense selection by showing students their functional relationship at the text level. (Author/VWL)

Examines students' ability to understand definitions of novel verbs--in 2 experiments upper elementary students received definitions of pseudowords paired with sentences using those words and evaluated use as appropriate for definition given. Finds students' judgments about these sentences were not substantially different from chance, suggesting…

Investigates the acquisition of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in second language Japanese by English learners. Aims to establish whether learners of Japanese are sensitive to the lexical-semantic characteristics of verbs in similar ways as learners of Romance languages who were found to follow the split intransitivity hierarchy.…

Discusses the unaccusative trap hypothesis, which provides a developmental account for a variety of seemingly unrelated syntactic phenomena in second language English, Japanese, and Chinese. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on an exceptional instance of nonadult positioning of clitics in early Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Greek with specific language impairment. Attributes misplaced clitics to children's incomplete knowledge concerning properties of the inflectional (Infl) particles, which interact in crucial ways with finite verb movement to mood. (Author/VWL)

Examines the negative modal form "can't" in French Sign Language (LSF). Contrasts the use of negation in LSF with that of American Sign language. Suggests the need for more holistic examination of signed languages. (Author/VWL)

The grammaticalization of "liao" as a main verb in tenth-century vernacular texts to "le" as an aspectual particle in modern Chinese is investigated. The change is attributed to the resultative construction coming into existence in the language and to instances where the verb took sentential subjects or occurred in temporal clauses only. (17…

Reviews and compares the main published repertoires of French verbs. By combining the material from these different sources, one can construct a database of approximately 10,300 formally distinct verbs. It is suggested that analysis of such a wide corpus may reveal structures not yet acknowledged. (Author/LMO)