Revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta, Georgia, December 1972. (DD)

Study arose out of the need for a functional analysis of the language of young children which might lead to an understanding of how language and context interact to produce differentiated speech, and what interpersonal situations were most fruitful in eliciting good communication. (Authors/CB)

Present a study in which Arab subjects were to change 10 English declarative sentences into yes/no questions. Results showed 25.6 percent of the answers were erroneous. An attempt is made to account for the source of error. Most errors were not due to effects of the native language, but to the verb form used. (PJM)

The acquisition of past tense inflectional suffixes using the written and fingerspelling modes were studied with 24 prelingually deaf children (ages 8 to 15 years) randomly assigned to fingerspelling, writing, and control groups. (PHR)

Pleads for proper consideration, in teaching French, of the continuing process of evolution of the language. Discusses, as an example of language change, the past participle construction in respect to distribution, morphology, and syntax. (IFS/WGA)

All the irregularities of all common French verbs are reduced to five categories in the "passe simple." This system facilitates learning the tense without memorizing each irregular verb independently. (PMJ)

Illustrates a stategy for teaching vocabulary, using a computer-held corpus of native speakers' contextualized utterances of each word. The purpose is for the learner to develop lexical competence, that is, the ability to use a word syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. Verbs are the focus of these materials although other parts of…

Investigated the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing using a word-by-word reading paradigm and a cross-modal integration paradigm. The study evaluated the experimental results with regard to serial autonomous models, strongly and weakly interactive models, and a hybrid model proposed here. (92 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses the feasibility of Basic Variety (BV) principles proposed by Klein and Perdue, arguing that some of them need clarification with learner varieties and that they are not part of Universal Grammar (UG) as they exclude phenomena (e.g., psych verbs) that cannot be excluded from the core of natural language. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Emphasizes that traditional textbook explanations of the preterite and imperfect tend to focus on their aspectual differences. The article argues that a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of these two tenses in narration must go beyond aspect to include their respective temporal and discourse properties. (30 references) (Author/CK)

Examines inalienable possession in French and Mandarin with the aim of bringing out typological affinities. In particular, two unresolved issues are re-examined: Haiman's Iconicity Hypothesis and the question of the protypical semantic categories of iposs. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Examines samples of writing by first-language speakers of Vietnamese to show that grounding, rather than lexical aspect, accounts for their selective marking of past tense. The article suggests that the learner-hypothesis governing this use of English past tense derives from the transference of a grounding-marking principle from a tense-free…

Four French-language classroom activities are described, including some winning exercises in a French-language teachers' contest, a reading exercise on Brazil, an activity for practicing verb tenses, and the use of songs to teach difficult pronunciation to students. (MSE)