This festscrift is presented in honor of Josef Vachek, founder of the linguistic section of the Department of English and American studies of the Purkyne University. Papers in the collection represent a wide spectrum of research and thought in linguistics and the English language and are authored by the following: (1) J. Firbas, Brno; (2) M.…

Compositions of 1000 words were collected from 32 eighth-graders and 32 twelfth-graders in Manitowac, Wisconsin. In each grade, 16 males and 16 females were equally distributed into two ability groups based on IQ. Data from the writing samples were analyzed with an analysis of variance in which the factors were grade, sex, and ability level. The…

This study investigated the effect of black dialect upon the comprehension of standard reading material by using 50 third-grade students. A sentence repetition test was administered individually to each subject to select pupils for either the standard or the dialect group. Subjects were tested for oral comprehension and silent reading…

Designed to provide a scale for assessing the quality of personal or imaginative writing, the Evaluation Scale for Personal Writing (ESPW) consists of a group of twenty-eight imaginative essays written by British fifteen year olds. These essays have been arranged in order of quality by an eight member sub-committee of the London Association for…

This paper examines and criticizes Lakoff's notions of a natural logic and of a generative semantics described in terms of logic. The author argues that the relationship of these notions to logic as normally understood is unclear but suggests a number of possible interpretations of the thesis of generative semantics. Further, on these…

This paper concerns the development of Papiamento, a creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, islands off the coast of Venezuela. The contributions of each of the languages which influenced its development--Portuguese, African languages, Spanish, and Dutch--are examined in successive sections of the paper, with a concluding portion…

This book presents a discussion of various distinctive characteristics of English as spoken in Canada. The book begins with a discussion of general characteristics and a look at the origins of Canadian English. There is a discussion of Canadianisms, Americanisms, and Britishisms and a consideration of influencing languages--Indian and Eskimo,…

This manual is intended for advanced university students in America who are learning Romanian as a third language. Part One is based upon an oral approach, each lesson containing a preparatory section in which the student is simultaneously introduced to pronunciation, intonation, and new semantic and syntactic structures. The second portion of the…

In this report, previous studies are reviewed in order to reconsider the assumption that lower class black children are generally deficient in their ability to produce syntactically elaborated speech. Though several studies have seemed to confirm the elaboration-deficiency hypothesis, the evidence presented is not convincing. Specific critiques of…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…

This paper investigates a type of grammatical ill-formedness in English which is traceable to the repetition, under certain specified conditions, of present participles, e.g. the verb "continue" cannot occur with participles if it is in the present progressive. The solution to generalizing about ill-formedness of this type is by means of a…

This text of literary and colloquial Russian is intended for advanced students who have a functional knowledge of essential structures and basic vocabulary. The main emphasis is on syntactical structure, stylistics of both the written and spoken language, general semantics, and the use of idioms. Grammatical statements pertaining to an item of…

This study investigated whether the number of oral reading miscues differs for reflective and impulsive children, whether the proportion of miscues that are semantically appropriate, syntactically appropriate, or graphically similar differ for the two groups, and whether the two groups differ in their self-correction behavior as it relates to…

This work contains five papers in the area of experimental linguistics. Papers include: (1) "Units of Speech Perception," a study which deals with problems of the temporal organization of speech; (2) a study, "Manner of Articulation, Parallel Processing, and the Perception of Duration," which examines the durational patterns characterizing the…

This paper considers whether the negative transportation (NT) rule operating in English is operative also in Japanese and whether investigation of the phenomenon in Japanese may provide new insights for English research. The discussion begins with an explanation and examples of the NT rule in English. Japanese cases are then studied, and the…