Deals with clause chaining in Washkuk, a language spoken by about 2500 people in northeastern New Guinea. Four clause types are ranked from lowest to highest. Any clause subordinates all preceding clauses of lower order. (TL)

The distinction between the clitics "le" and "lo" is different for Peninsular Spanish than for Latin American Spanish but is in both cases systematic. The division in Castilian Spanish is along the line of animate-inanimate. The Latin American division is between accusative and dative case. (TL)

The article reports on an experimental study undertaken in a suburban Parisian kindergarten to determine the optimum environment for child language development. Adult-child interaction is underlined as essential in the acquisition process. Observation methods and specific examples of the effect of child-adult interaction are outlined. (Text is in…

Examines the relationship between language acquisition and current linguistic theory, with specific reference to Chomsky's work. Linguistic areas that should be explored in relation to acquisition are suggested, including regional dialect studies, the place of sociolinguistic factors in acquisition, and syntax. Suggestions as to how to analyze…

Mainly concerned with where negative questions in Chinese originate.An abstract treatment allows the derviation of all questions from a general underlying structure with disjunctive pattern and accounts for the discordance between the answer to a negative question and its answer particle. (Author/RM)

Attempts to show that the comparison of language structures may be relevant to diachronic linguistics, and in particular to areal linguistics. The article is based on an ongoing comparative study aimed at devising a typology of African languages. (Author/RM)

This article examines child acquisition of syntax through a chronological distributional analysis. The main point is that the development of syntactic relations is neither behaviorist nor pre-programmed but dynamic, and that therefore child linguistic development cannot be described in terms of an innate adult language ideal. (Text is in French.)…

The first half of a survey of inflectional elements required for modally unmarked verb forms (non-TA verbs) of Parry Island Ojibwa. Besides markers (the participants) and theme signs (rolls), meanings of the inflected forms are described and represented as a specific semological structure made up of grammatical and semological units. (SC)

Some composition teachers believe that students may write more competently in subject matter courses than in writing courses. That is, the constraints of writing for a class or assignment in which the composition skills will be evaluated may prevent students from writing their best. With this in mind, a study was conducted to determine whether…

Relational Grammar, which has evolved from transformational grammar, relies on a "universal grammar" approach. By closely studying this approach, linguists will be able to understand Relational Grammar (RG) well enough to be able to participate in its further development. The basic assumptions of RG are that…

The generic use of masculine terms may be viewed as a grammatical device that carries the non-specific meaning of gender without confusion with the specific meaning, or as a practice in which the masculine terms retain their gender-specific meaning in neutral contexts and bias the perceiver toward the interpretations of male references. In three…

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that he or she must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodic cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. The success of the method of repeated readings and similar…