Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Demonstrates the role of punctuation in relation to the syntax, communicative value, and semantics of the French sentence. (AM)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

Examined the effects of syntactic (tense) violations occurring on regularly versus irregularly inflected verbs using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Discusses implications of the results with respect to morphological parsing, the time course of syntactic feature analysis, and their consequent effects on temporal properties of ERP…

Two experiments examined whether infants might use the prosody of sentences to organize and remember spoken information. Results suggest that infants better remember phonetic properties of words prosodically linked together within a single clause rather than a list, and words that are prosodically linked within a single clausal unit as opposed to…

Discusses the difference between a complex sentence and a compound sentence, and how they are used in technical writing and in Victorian fiction. (SR)

Considers several difficulties, both empirical and conceptual, that arise from the formulation of the classical Binding Theory that states the following: (1) an anaphor must be locally bound, (2) a pronoun must not be locally bound, and (3) an R-expression must not be bound. Ways of overcoming these difficulties are presented. (39 references) (GLR)

Observation of sentences shows that expected incompatibility of the present perfect in English and adverbs of finished time may be ignored by speakers who focus on the current relevance of the event to the moment of speaking. Communicational problems and conflicts may be resolved pragmatically with reference to the principal purpose of…

Critiques Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier-scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, showing serious theoretical problems with their results and proposing a quantifier-scope analysis that avoids those problems. The proposed expert system considers several important considerations and arrives at a composite…

Results of three experiments are reported that investigated the processing of locally ambiguous object-subject sentences in German. The aim was to test whether the type of grammatical information that signals garden-path has an impact on how difficult it is to arrive at the correct structural assignment. (Author/VWL)

Shows that the German "perfekt" has a uniform temporal meaning that results systematically from the interaction of its three components--finiteness marking, auxiliary, and past participle--and that the two readings are the consequence of a structural ambiguity. This analysis also predicts the properties of other participle constructions, in…

Outlines three criteria that justify using passive voice. Claims teaching sentence focus--keeping the topic of the sentence in the subject position--will accomplish the end of teaching the appropriate uses of active and passive voice (NH)

Shows that there are at least two types of gapping in natural languages: canonical gapping and LPD. Argues that Chinese has some gapping sentences that result from ATB movement from V to "v." Data from Chinese affirm Johnson's (1994) theory of gapping that gapping occurs in those languages only with verb movement. (Author/VWL)

Outlines basic functions of passive constructions in language in general, and describes in more detail what form this takes in a proposal of American Sign Language (ASL). Compares discourse examples of active and passive constructions in ASL, addresses the role of topicalization in passive constructions, and discusses passives and reference…

"Of the many difficulties young writers may encounter when engaged in the complex act of writing, crafting sentences that accurately convey their intended meaning is particularly challenging. Sentence combining can provide systematic instruction in sentence-construction skills within an overall framework of the writing workshop."