This paper suggests that traditional syntax describes a sentence's syntactic structure, and that verb valence theory describes a sentence's semantic structure. According to this theory, a verb has a certain valence, or power to attract a certain number of "adjuncts." It is further shown that a given semantic structure can be converted into…

This study is concerned with the description of compound sentences, relative clauses, and complement clauses in Standard Persian within a generative-transformational grammar. Compound sentences are divided into conjunctive, disjunctive, and adversative types on the basis of the semantic relations they express. A conjunctive clause is either…

"Done" occurs outside of the participle paradigm in several varieties of English particularly those associated currently or historically with the South. This feature is also found in Appalachian English. Grammatical classifications have been proposed, including that of quasi-modal, pre-verbal form, and adverb. None of the labelling…

This is a two-way contrastive analysis of the use of the article in English and Hungarian. The study works in both theoretical and applied contrastive linguistics by stating the rules governing determination and developing a methodology for analysis, and by noting language acquisition difficulties to reduce language learning interference. Part One…

Ten papers resulting from the Basque linguistics seminar are collected in this volume. Following introductions by L. Michelena and William A. Douglass, the papers are: (1)"Morphological Evidence of Abstract Verbs in Basque" by Glenn Ayres, (2) "A Survey of Linguistic Variables in the Central Zone of the Deva River Valley" by Ramon M. S. Bereicua…

This paper argues that the hypothesis that all languages have a definitization process is empirically refutable, and that use of the terminology "definite" and "indefinite" is justified in that it reflects intuitions of grammarians and linguists. The following statements are tested against evidence from samples of different languages: (1) all noun…

Syntactic differences between languages are the focus of attention in this approach to contrastive study of grammatical categories. The categories of the first language are listed in a "translation-paradigm" opposite the possible categories of the target language after translation of the corpus. Three examples which contrast the clause, verbal…

Relatively little research has been done on the quantitative characteristics of children's word usage. This spoken count was undertaken to investigate those aspects of word usage and frequency which could cast light on lexical processes in grammar and verbal development in children. Three groups of 30 children each (boys and girls) from…

This course in Czech, consisting of 162 lessons in 19 volumes, is designed to train native English Speakers to a level 3 proficiency in comprehension and speaking and level 3 proficiency in reading and writing Czech. The texts are intended for classroom use in the Defense Language Institute's intensive programs employing the audiolingual…

Describes research done to determine whether there is a statistical relationship between an English as a second language learner's ability to determine a word's morphemes or structural units and his/her ability to comprehend written English text. (SED)

Reviews conditions under which the French familiar forms and terminology are used, linguistic values associated with its use (liaison, hesitation, morphosyntax, mode of address, inappropriate use of terms, truncation, and borrowed foreign terms), and the relationship of familiarity to communicative competence. (MSE)

In an investigation of how different types of topic reinstatements affected second language learners' recognition and recall of sentence topics in lectures, it was learned that repeated structures were more easily recalled and recognized than simple ones, and low English proficiency learners have poorer recall of complex structures. (MSE)

A study of English speakers' acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portugese is reported. Various structures were tested to separate interlanguage features attributable to first language interference from those universal to second language acquisition. Application of an accessibility hierarchy theory and…

Reports on an investigation into the patterns of the learning of French grammar in French primary schools. Specifically the learning of form classes (verb, adjective, noun), syntax, and morphological markers was studied. (AM)

Proposes a dynamical systems approach to parsing in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. The experiments discussed documented various contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. (47 references) (Author/CK)