Part of the Grade Teacher special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

The written language characteristics of 26 learning disabled (LD), 26 low achieving (LA), and 26 achieving (ACH) students in grades 7 through 10 were measured using paragraph writing and topic sentence tasks. Tests of differences between LD and LA Ss revealed that spelling was the only formal feature which was significantly higher in the LA group.…

A course in introductory Greek was introduced as part of a freshman seminar program at William Patterson College of New Jersey. The course was distinctive in that the instructor undertook to learn the subject along with the students. The goal of the course was that the students would learn something about Greek, about language in general and about…

An outline is presented of how "Interscript," a developing international communication system, operates. The three main elements in "Interscript" are described in turn, as follows: (1) the glyphs or symbols, which are pictographs, ideographs, arbitrary symbols, and generic symbols; (2) "Clearthink", or what would correspond to the identification…

Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions is extended to include Lewis' basic categories. The distinction as applied to sentences is brought out by investigating the consequences of the failure of presupposed sentences. Stalnaker uses Donnellan's distinction to support his theory of creating an…

This grammar handbook analyzes the rules of Solomon Islands Pijin and provides exercises on them. It is divided into 24 lessons. The first part of each lesson is a description of some element or function of the language, with examples; the second part is made up of oral and written exercises. The volume concludes with appendices on the personal…

It is contended that there are such things as discourse blocs, and that they are composed of discourse units glued together into a contextuated whole by bloc signals. There are three kinds of structures with which it is necessary to deal in order to discuss coherent discourse: the discourse bloc, the discourse unit, and the bloc signal.…

A method is described for choosing sample sizes when the domain to be sampled consists of a finite set of sentences and the purpose is to construct a test to assess the comprehension or the readability of written discourse. The testing method is that proposed in Bormuth's work on transformational analysis within a criterion-referenced measurement…

Eliminating errors is neither as simple nor as important as back-to-basics critics believe; however, correctness does need to be considered in composition instruction. Error affects a reader's judgment of writing quality and interferes with the communication between reader and writer. It may also hinder the composing process of some writers. Major…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

The constraints in English on the definiteness, specificity, humaness and animacy of noun phrases (NP's) undergoing passive and dative movement are examined. Evidence presented shows that these constraints occur in other languages in marked and unmarked constructions as absolute constraints on acceptability or as tendencies. This suggests a…

An introductory textbook on Tamil grammar is presented. Tamil is spoken by the majority of the people who live in the State of Tamil Nadu in India. The 35 lessons cover the following: the Tamil alphabet, pronouns, morphophonemic rules, the plural, the imperative, the infinitive and negative imperative, oblique forms and uses, the dative and…

An 18-month study of the development of communicative competence in three Kaluli children from Papua, New Guinea, shows that Kaluli children use pragmatically appropriate word order before they correctly indicate "agent" by casemarking. In Kaluli, pragmatic concerns determine word order. The noun which the speaker intends to focus on is…