An attempt is made to overcome the shortcomings in Robinson's model of generative grammar by modifying her dependency rules and adding semantic specifications to the dependents of V, taking into account some of the considerations that led Fillmore to make up his cases. (Author)

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

Modern linguistic theory offers two main contributions to the improvement of writing: readability and appropriateness. Readability can be developed by improving the correctness of forms used and achieved by carrying out an error analysis on the student's writing to provide insights into errors and clause structure. Linguists have determined that…

A generative semantic model for a componential analysis of prepositions in Italian sentences is described and critiqued. According to the model, a sentence is analyzed in terms of a "predicate" plus one or more "arguments." The model emphasizes the semantic role of prepositions and regards this role as the basis for a syntactic…

In tracing the development of language curriculum in public schools, one discovers that prior to the twentieth century grammar was the center of linguistic attention. Around the beginning of the century, psychologists and others were doing research on the supposed efficacious results of such study and were finding that such supposed results were…

THROUGH THEIR LOSS OF FAITH IN TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR, MEN HAVE "SINNED" AND CONTRIBUTED SLIGHTLY BUT IMPORTANTLY TO THE CREATION OF AN AMORAL AND RELATIVISTIC SOCIETY. PROMPTED BY THE SIN OF INTELLECTUAL PRIDE, SOME LINGUISTS SEEM TO ASSUME THAT GRAMMATICAL PROBLEMS CAN BE SOLVED BY RATIOCINATION ALONE. IGNORANCE OF THE PAST--ANOTHER SIN--AND…

GENERATIVE THEORY NOW DOMINATES MACHINE TRANSLATION AND HAS BEGUN TO TAKE OVER THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR IN THE SCHOOLS, AS ONE PUBLISHER AFTER ANOTHER COMES OUT WITH A TRANSFORMATIONALLY-ORIENTED SERIES OF TEXTBOOK FOR HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH. THE AUTHOR FEELS, HOWEVER, THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS THEORY ON LANGUAGE TEACHING HAVE BEEN NEGLIGIBLE…

The discussion throughout this paper is devoted to answering the question: What is the nature of our knowledge of language and what theoretical assumptions does the answer entail for linguistic description? Discussed are--(1) what it means to know a language, (2) the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, (3) justification of…

This issue is devoted to language universals and consists of 4 papers. "Zulu Nominal Modification - An Outline," by A. Johnston, discusses modifiers in Zulu and their relation to nominals. "Shape Classifiers and Natural Categories," by S.G. Pulman, discusses the role of the dimension of "shape" in language…

Two grammars (traditional and transformational) and two methods of teaching (direct and indirect) were measured to determine their effects upon the writing performance of students of low socioeconomic backgrounds. While the direct teaching of grammar was concerned with the correction of specific errors, the indirect teaching was concerned with a…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

The author suggest that this book, written primarily as a working textbook for second-year university students reading Malay, may also be used by those "interested in the application of a formal grammatical framework to the sentences of a language which belongs to the Austronesian family." Basing her analysis on the principles of structural…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how languages express contrastive emphasis. It is argued that all contrastively emphasized constructions have underlying cleft sentences, independent of whether the surface structure is an equational or a nonequational one. It is furthermore argued that emphatic word orders are systematic and predictable…

This dissertation describes the grammatical structure of Shuswap, an American Indian language of the Salishan family spoken in British Columbia, Canada. The research was carried out on the Naskanlith Reserve near Chase, British Columbia, during the summers of 1966-69. Prior to this study, the language was last investigated before the turn of the…

The paper shows informally how model-theoretical semantics may be used by a computer to give a straight-forward analysis of the meaning of children's language. This approach to semantics grows out of the main thrust of work in mathematical logic. It is discussed in the framework of generative grammar and is based on the application of the…