Intended to help institutions place their entering students in regular freshman English composition courses, the Test of Standard Written English (TSWF) is most useful to colleges that also offer alternate courses designed to improve students' understanding of the material explored by the test. The Test of Standard Written English assesses…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

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…

Noting that no clear and adequate basis for a theory of translation exists at this time, this article examines problems common to three fundamental elements of translation. Illustrative examples, taken from Slavic languages, relate to discussion of grammatical, semantic-lexical, and stylistic aspects of translation. Various contributions of…

The research reported is part of an investigation into the acquisition of grammar, using nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Three children were seen for approximately 8 hours, every 6 weeks, in their homes, from the age of 19 months--soon after the earliest…

In viewing the approach to English and other grammars in the light of linguistic universals, the author feels that the principal justification for deep structure analysis of English is that "deep structure analyses of all the languages of our multilingual world in combination can serve as a genuinely scientific basis of a defensible universal…

The recent history and present state of linguistics in the English classroom present a dismal prospect. The structural-grammar textbooks of the forties and fifties were inadequate, and the grammars of the sixties, although improved by the influence of Chomsky and his colleagues, are still not as good as they should be. Also of questionable value…

Changes in concepts of usage as illustrated in 111 high school English language textbooks published from 1923 to 1963 formed the subject of this study. The textbooks were placed in one of four groups according to publication date: 1923-1940, 1941-1952, 1953-1958, and 1959-1963. The purpose of the grouping was to determine whether certain usage…

This paper investigates a type of grammatical ill-formedness in English which is traceable to the repetition, under certain specified conditions, of present participles, e.g. the verb "continue" cannot occur with participles if it is in the present progressive. The solution to generalizing about ill-formedness of this type is by means of a…

Rules of lexical derivation can be used to account for certain case-related regularities existing between Japanese non-potential verbs and the potential verbs derived from them. Lexical derivation analysis in comparison with a transformational approach is simpler; it requires less powerful rules and therefore makes a stronger claim; and it…

This text compiles papers treating problems in literary analysis which were read at a conference at the University of Toronto, Canada. Papers include: (1) "Elements Phonostylistiques du Texte Litteraire," (2) Some uses of the Grammar in Poetic Analysis, (3) "Morphosyntaxe et Stylistique," (4) "Le Lexique dans l'Oeuvre Litteraire," (5) "Analyse…

This paper seeks to discover the rules active in the formation of tags (intonation tags, declarative tags, and tag questions) in English. The author discusses former analyses of these constructions and presents his own thoughts with many examples, concluding that English has at least two tag formation rules: one that accounts (perhaps…

This document provides the Arlington Education and Employment Program's (REEP) favorite techniques for teaching English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) grammar. The focus, levels, and materials needed are presented for each of the techniques as well as the steps to follow. (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education) (Author/VWL)