Introduces a hypertext data model for textual databases in which the text is divided into a syntactic structure, which describes the relationships of the text parts, and an access structure, which is generated from the syntactic structure by users' queries. Implementation considerations for the structuring component, retrieval component, and…

Discusses a recent British project that aimed to incorporate sociolinguistic research into classroom procedures. One of the goals of the project was to enlist teachers and their students as researchers, to obtain systematic information on local dialect grammar. (39 references) (VWL)

Describes a variant on parentese involving parent's use of irregular and unpredictable grammar, compares it to parentese directed toward normal learners, relates it to patterns of parentese observed in other families, particularly parents of children with handicaps, and deduces its function. (10 references) (GLR)

Forty-six Spanish-speaking children ages four, six, or eight years viewed a short silent film and told what happened in the film. The stories of older children included more narrative actions, more mental state/goal causes, more three-clause causal sequences, and a lower proportion of unrelated statements than those of younger children.…

A reassessment of the role of negative evidence in nonnative language acquisition argues that the grammar-building process cannot make use of negative evidence to restructure interlanguage grammars, and that second-language learners do not unlearn verb movement but extend the pattern with which they are already familiar. (46 references) (Author/CB)

Analyzes U.S. Supreme Court decisions as speech acts to determine how the opinions communicate the legitimacy of the court's decisions and secure the consensus of the discourse community, investigating such aspects as institutional context, the adversarial context of legal communication, the grammar of conflict, and the rhetoric of discovery. (64…

This study, involving 26 children (ages 44-70 months) with impairments in grammar and phonology, found that children receiving either a clinician-administered or parent-administered intervention showed gains in expressive grammar, but there were no indirect effects on subjects' phonological production. Language intervention approaches for young…

A theory of normal and delayed development of language is presented, arguing that linguistic capacity develops in gradual, sequential, critically timed phases; children with slowly developing brains have delays in storing utterances; a critical period for activation of experience-dependent grammatical mechanisms declines without optimal result;…

Certain apparently deviant, inverted forms of the French imperative (e.g. "pas touche!" for "ne touche pas!") are analyzed. A number of phonosyntactic explanations that focus on phonological order, rhythm, and intonation are examined. The strength of the imperative intention is also considered. (MSE)

Argues that the use of evidentials illuminates differences between arguments written by experienced academic writers and those written by student writers. Reveals differences in the epistemological stance underlying both groups. Analyzes discursive examples by both groups. (HB)

Argues that a unified account for the observed phenomena in first- and second-language acquisition and in native speaker use of tense-aspect morphology (TMA) is found in the discourse function of TMA. Three cognitive principles (Relevance, Congruence, One to One) plus access to a notion of prototypicality can account for language learners'…

Demonstrates that the acquisition of English reflexives by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learners is not a valid test for parameter resetting in second-language learning, because English reflexives share the same setting as phrasal reflexives in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. (23 references) (MDM)

Lists the 50 most common writing errors made by college students of French. Mistakes in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar are included. (CK)

Evaluated the development of temporal location within a cross-linguistic experimental design. The research focused on the transition from a temporal system based on absolute temporal relations involving speech time and event time to a more complex system involving relative temporal relationships and reference time. (48 references) (JL)

A brief discussion of learning styles, language classroom environmental factors, and teacher methods leads up to explanation of a simple diagrammatic model for use in teaching tenses in the English-as-a-foreign-language class. (five references) (CNP)