A number of Seri verbs display a sensitivity to whether a goal, which is a term used for recipients, adressees, etc., is singular or plural. The data presented in this paper are of typological interest. It is argued that Seri has indirect objects, but that there is no one-to-one mapping between the semantic role goal and either the syntactic…

This paper examines a phenomenon in the Setswana language whereby certain affixes, when combining with the verbal base, adjust their positions and forms according to phonological rules that can be termed "imbrication." D. T. Cole, among others, made a fair attempt at a morphological identification of these realizations, but did not go…

This paper focuses on the long-standing problem in Bantu syntax of why some objects lose the ability to be realized as object markers (OMs) in the passive. The standard answer to this question since the work of Gary and Keenan (1977) is that the passive and object marker require the same property (e.g., a grammatical relation or a particular case)…

This paper argues that one important reflection of a culture's status is the existence of general reference books on it. To this end, it discusses the forthcoming "Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English," a book designed to address the lack of a comprehensive reference work on Appalachian speech and language patterns in this region. The…

The distribution of Hualapai auxiliary verbs "-yu" and "-wi" can not be explained only by the presence or absence of an object, or by the active or stative feature of the matrix verb. It can be explained in terms of transitivity, in that "-wi" corresponds to high transitivity and "-yu" to low transitivity of…

The claim that children's early word combinations are best described in terms of semantic categories such as agent, rather than abstract categories such as subject, rests on the assumption that 2-year-olds have a notion of agency that acts as a springboard for knowledge of more formal categories. The literature of developmental psychology suggests…

The relationship between the realization of the argument-structure of a verb and its acquisition as a lexical item was investigated in a case study. The subject was a girl aged 2.3 years whose father was a native English-speaker and whose mother was a native Japanese speaker who also spoke English. The child had been born in the United States but…

The patterns of acquisition of the passe compose and imperfect tenses in French among 16 adult beginning and intermediate students were studied. Based on 15-minute speech samples in which both verb tenses were elicited by seeded questions and cues for descriptive and narrative monologues, the intermediate learners had greater success with the…

Designed as a criterion-referenced scale to describe levels of writing skill development for basic essay elements, this instrument provides separate six-point rating scales for general competence of a narrative essay and the levels of development of focus and organization, support, and grammar/mechanics. The mechanics scale includes a brief guide…

Interest in the application of modern linguistic theory in composition research has faded, possibly because some of the basic principles that inform linguistic study have been misunderstood. For example, a common misconception is that linguists use the term "generate" to mean "produce." However, the purpose of a generative…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT (Except for the Evaluation Summary Table): PRODUCER: Educulture, 1 Dubuque Plaza, Suite 803, Dubuque, Iowa 52001. EVALUATION COMPLETED: May 1982 by the staff and constituents of Lehigh University and Bethlehem PA Public Schools. VERSION: Examination Package (Evaluators were unable to determine…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

As an example leading toward a social grammar of language, three emotions are analyzed in English and Yoruba. Certain communication features in English that lie in intonation and stress require a change of grammar in Yoruba and that these changes are subject to further categorization through status and solidarity. (Author/RM)

Deals with problems encountered by English learners of French in learning to use nouns, articles and the present tense, and in using them together. A way to revise the presentation of the French noun-article system and to make the identification of nouns and articles easier is presented. (CLK)

The modal auxiliary system in both German and English is seen as a grammatical category (relative assertion) which stands in specific opposition to the absence of a modal in a sentence (factual assertion). (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)