This dissertation seeks to provide an improved syntactic analysis of the phenomena known as "island constraints" and to offer a natural explanation for these and other phenomena in behavioral terms. The author approaches the problem using the notions of "nucleus" and "satellite," and shows that these concepts are a necessary part of a…

This final volume of a three-part report on various language research projects contains ten studies on a wide variety of language issues. The topics include "Some Aspects of Language Interference,""Contrastive Analysis of Case Marking in Polynesian Languages,""Notes on the Formation of Complex Sentences in Tunisian Arabic with Emphasis on the…

Since the beginning of man's awareness of his language capabilities and language structure, he has assumed that speech is composed of discrete entities. The linguist attempts to establish a model of the workings of these distinctive sounds in a language. Utilizing an historical basis for discussion, this general survey of the distinctive feature…

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. This paper represents the beginning of a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrates on comparing the syntax used by ten…

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

This collection of papers is divided into four sections. Section 1, "Historical Linguistics," includes "The Grammaticalization of Non-Dative Reflexes of Latin ill- in Spanish" (Jose R. Carrasquel) and "'Esto es Ligero de Fazer': Object to Subject Raising in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish" (Mark Davies). Section 2, "Language Acquisition and…

A group of seven Japanese-language Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) testers licensed by the American Council on the Teaching of foreign Languages (ACTFL) conducted research related to ACTFL-OPI criteria. They first examined 24 audiotaped interview tests to see what kind of consistency there would be when individual testers applied general criteria…

Discusses the advantages of the use of large natural language corpora in promoting grammatical awareness among language teachers and students, focusing on word classes and prescriptive approaches to language as they relate to Britain's National Curriculum at the elementary level. (13 references) (MDM)

This paper presents a class of sentences that certain syntactic rules of English would be expected to produce, but that are not grammatical. The sentences all involve the raising of a sentential Noun Phrase (NP) and the subsequent application of some syntactic rule to that senential NP. A constraint, referred to as the Antigone Constraint, is…

In Spanish, there is a very common type of sentence that has the following properties: (1) one of the arguments of the verb is a noun phrase that consists of an article and a noun; (2) there is also a dative pronoun dependent on the verb; and (3) the dative pronoun is understood as the possessor of the definite noun. It has been suggested that…

Case studies provide detailed comparisons, arranged alphabetically by title for ease of reference, of 26 problems in Modern English grammar, from both the old grammar (OG) and new grammar (NG) viewpoints. This A-Z approach juxtaposes contributions made by OG and NG to the description of Modern English grammar. Part I surveys large OG and NG…

This article aims to discover the latent organization of a text by revealing a semantically motivated pattern of language functions that inform the theme of a story. it is shown how this pattern of linguistic features in the text provides insights into the literary effects of a description of a scene of a novel. The analysis proposed follows the…

This discussion on the interpretation of language and the role of inference argues that language is a tool in the sense that it provides the basic operators and rules of operation for speech just as arithmetic does for calculation. It is suggested that because language is a tool that is restricted in its expressive potential by the linguistic…

Lexicographers have been arguing for the inclusion of abstract and complex grammatical information in dictionaries. This paper examines the extent to which information about quantifiers and the argument structure of verbs is encoded in English learner's dictionaries. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (1989), the Longman Dictionary of…

The relationship between linguistic types and the valence of operators on the genotype level of Applicative Universal Grammar (AUG) is examined. Assuming that the "t" and "s" types may be treated as zero-place operators, a relationship is found between the valence of an operator and its genotype, which explains the difference…