Concepts that deal with various aspects of communicative success, or "success concepts," include grammaticality, acceptability, appropriateness, and interpretability. Because different grammarians espouse different ideas of correctness, grammaticality, defined as the relation between an utterance and a grammatical description of its language, must…

This paper examines nominalization and serial verb construction (SVC) in Dagaare, a West African language. It discusses nominalization theory and its relation to Germanic languages such as English, German, and Dutch, using insights gained from the study of these languages to help illuminate nominalization in Dagaare and other similar West African…

This work discusses the limits of conversion, or zero-derivation, as a nominalization process in the Choctaw language. It demonstrates that Choctaw relies on zero derivation for many nominalizations, but that this is a process occurring in the lexicon and therefore not a word formation rule. It also asserts that there is one reliable lexeme-level…

A study traced the discourse control of one writer, over 3 years, from his basic writing course to his junior year "membership" in academia. It reported on the student's transitions in areas of print code control in 28 writing tasks from 6 classes covering 3 disciplines. The analysis involved 38 error patterns, including spelling,…

In standard American English, the word "like" has several senses associated with it, the earliest of which dates to the 14th century. Some meanings reflect recent developments in the language and suggest that the lexical aspects of the word are changing toward a more grammatical function. Analysis of historical information and data collected in…

The first contacts between linguistics and second language acquisition date from the period of contrastive analysis of languages, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When contrastive analysis failed as an explanatory model, linguists lost interest in second language research and descriptive/contrastive studies declined, resulting in a changed…

The dangers of translation are discussed when the translator does not try to create textual equivalence, but settles for formal correspondence (i.e., with simple transcoding at a linguistic level) during the process of translating. Difficulties of explaining, commenting, or summarizing rather than translating are also discussed. Pedagogical and…

A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is examined for its implications for acquisition of verb movement. Mark Baker's proposal extends the Move-alpha rule to posit that the head of any phrase may be moved to become incorporated into the head of any phrase that properly governs the phrase where…

An often-noted contrast between child and adult language is that young children produce sentences both with and without lexical subjects even if subjects are obligatory in the adult system. However, in Dutch, there is no such structural difference between the earliest stages of Dutch child grammar and the adult stage where subjects are concerned.…

Some Japanese examples of several common phonological phenomena (whispered vowels, nuclear friction, and consonant-vowel articulation) are examined. The segmental and transformational characterizations of these and related phenomena are reassessed and it is shown that by paying more careful attention to phonetic detail and abandoning conventional…

The study evaluated whether specifically language impaired (SLI) children (N=6 and ages 5-8) manifested atypical or normal but delayed development in their interpretation of PRO (an empty pronomial element which has also been termed "a missing complement subject"). Language samples were taken and analyzed twice over a 9-12 month period. Among…

The three tests that make up this instrument are designed to assess the oral communication, grammatical fluency, and vocabulary development of students for whom English is a second language. The spoken English test comes in two versions: one with 90 items on a cassette tape, the other with 90 items to be read aloud by the examiner. Each version is…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT (Except for the Evaluation Summary Table): PRODUCER: Milliken Publishing Company, 1100 Research Blvd., St. Louis MO 63132. EVALUATION COMPLETED: June 1982, by staff of the Portland Public Schools, Multnomah ESD, Portland, Oregon. COST: $80 per module; $375 for series of 5 modules. ABILITY LEVEL: 3-9.…

Situations are given with which to teach beginners the English simple present in its meaning of habitual action. For advanced students, situations and dialogs are suggested with which the future meaning of the simple present can be expressed and learned. (IFS/WGA)

An underlying representation for passive sentences in Mojave and Uto-Aztecan is proposed, and the broader issues that arise in extending the analysis to other languages and incorporating it in linguistic theory as a substantive language universal are explored. (Author/RM)