Investigated teachers' attitudes toward grammar instruction in the business communications classroom. Indicated that the majority of instructors believed that business communication students would profit from grammar instruction. Presented statistics showing a 14.3 percentage of actual grammar instruction. (JD)

Discusses various definitions of markedness in terms of second language acquisition and describes a study testing one such definition which found that second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in the second language but did accept double object construction and suggested that transfer took place only with one of two marked…

Analysis of tense usage in 20 scientific articles from the "Journal of Pediatrics" reveals a hierarchy of sociolinguistic relationships among context-dependent rhetorical functions, context-independent temporal meanings, and actual tense choices. (Author/CB)

Describes teaching method in which junior high school students (1) take dictation of a sentence illustrating rules of usage; (2) copy it, punctuate it, and identify rules for its punctuation; and (3) discuss the sentence after the teacher writes it on the board. Notes that all low-average ninth graders thus trained passed the High School…

Stresses that understanding the impact of interaction with mass media requires conceptualizing media as an institutionalized social form. A critical feature of this process is the grammatical character of media interaction in the form of rhythm and tempo, because these rhythms and tempos become established in everyday routine. (SKC)

Details a data-based study exploring the relationship between grammatical proficiency and a number of variables in an introductory business communication course. Suggests that there is a small, but significant correlation between grammatical proficiency and overall performance in the course, and that grammatical competency is a predictor of…

Longitudinal data regarding three children's learning of English as a second language in a classroom setting support the hypothesis that the distribution of grammatical variants in learner speech is sensitive to linguistic context. Results suggest that the learners acquired the target language variants in "pronoun contexts" before "noun contexts."…

Describes a parsing program called "Analyzing Language" (AL). The Augmented Transition Network was modified to incorporate case grammar analysis. Turbo PASCAL is the program's language. (Author/LMO)

Presents a poem suitable for teaching Kenneth Burke's concepts of grammar, rhetoric and symbolic in a literary work and explores three elements in the work. (HTH)

The article examines the child's ability to produce complex sentences with sections on a structural framework for complex language (clausal and nonclausal complexity), a developmental perspective (coordination of clauses, subordination of nominal, adverbial, and relative clauses), and applied considerations (evaluating and teaching complex…

Reviews recent studies concerning the acquisition of gender systems of different languages and the development of the mass/count distinction in English, focusing on evaluation of the early formal learning approach. (CB)

A study of English as a second language students' generalization of second-language learning showed that maximal generalization of learning took place from structures that were typologically more marked to those structures that were typologically less marked, and not the reverse. (Author/CB)

Considers marked and unmarked structures in modern Arabic in terms of defending a basic unmarked structure which carries the least presuppositional background to which other surface orders can be related and a lexical treatment of number in Arabic. (CB)

Shows, on empirical grounds, that a verb phrase (VP) is absent in the Arabic sentence structure through specific examination of the language's syntactic property. (CB)

Recent changes in French grammatical and spelling conventions not generally known in North America are outlined, including instances of gender and number agreement, plurals of hyphenated words, articles, numerical adjectives, indefinites, verb forms, and accent marks. (MSE)