This study assessed the effectiveness of five hours of distributed training on three-year-old children's comprehension and production of the passive, negative, possessive and negative passive syntactic structures. A comprehension test identified 20 children who did not evidence understanding of these structures. Subject were randomly assigned to…

This study compared the use of oral language of children who had participated in a Head Start program with that of children with no preschool experience. Of the 43 children enrolled in Project Uplift, 25 were Afro-American, one was Anglo-American, and seventeen were Mexican-American. It was found that Head Start participation for the groups…

This second volume of a three-part language research report presents a sketch of Hungarian syntax with emphasis on several particular aspects of grammar. The first section considers the noun phrase and covers such issues as internal word order, number, demonstratives, cases and postpositions, genitive constructions, pronominal forms of cases and…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

Defends the valence theory as being useful in the constrastive aspect of foreign language teaching. Numerous examples are given illustrating how the semantic characteristics of the subject limit the possible choices of verbs that can occur with it. (IFS/WGA)

This article hypothesizes that causative constructions among the languages of the world share some fundamental characteristics, even though they have different ordering restrictions and varying degrees of fusion. (Author/NCR)

This article describes a practical classroom approach to teaching the Spanish subjunctive to lower level classes using impersonal expressions. (NCR)

A Spanish lesson is presented with sections on grammar, vocabulary, and expressions (modismos) with written test exercises and an assigned composition. (Text is in Spanish.) (NCR)

A collection of four short articles giving detailed lesson plans using magazines, editorials and recipes to teach grammar. "A" is used as the example in these lesson plans. The first article deals with avoir and the past participle. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Mirror images in constituent order are found in a wide range of parallel clause types in Japanese and English. Three detailed explanations for linear orderings are provided. (Author/HP)

All modern Romance languages except Rumanian have a class of causative + infinitive construction in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive. This article investigates the question of how agentivization of the infinitive subject is to be handled in these languages. (DS)

This study has as its point of departure the nature of the passive and the linguistic point of view on it taken by textbooks. Topics treated are; passive voice or sentence; surface and deep structure; passive transformation; its relationship to the message; textbooks and their function. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Suggests a parallelism between children's mastery of mental language and their thinking about the world. Recounts a study in which children's mastery of verbs was measured and a relationship between reading skill and looking to the text to justify answers was established. (AEW)

Discusses main ideas of papers presented that reflect the new directions explored in the field of Chinese linguistics. Current areas of study include tonal distinctions in dialect studies, contrastive analysis of Taiwanese and standard Chinese verb phrase structures, and the application of old Chinese morphological grammar to characteristics of…

A contrastive analysis of Hebrew and English dress and cooking verbs and their noun/object collocations supports a series of generalizations about second-language learning and reveals that psychosociolinguistic and situational factors influence the behavior of both native and foreign users of language. (Author/CB)