The processes by which the young child recognizes and regenerates some invariant and organizational properties of language are discussed. In these processes the child conjoins and contrasts recurrent segments--perhaps a recurrent word--of the messages presented to him. After repeated exposure to messages containing a common segment, the child…

A study designed to investigate to what extent ethno-linguistic background affects speech patterns and syntactic flexibility of grades one, four and six children from monolingual, bilingual-French and bilingual-German rural communities. A total of 216 randomly selected subjects were used; they were selected from nine rural Manitoba schools, and…

This paper examines the formal means by which Czech distinguishes transitive and intransitive verbs, and specifically the role of the particle "se" in the process usually called "derived intransitivization.""Se" is shown to perform a number of functions which preclude its being called simply an "intransitivizing…

This article suggests ways in which a current research article on employment discrimination from the "American Sociological Review" can be used in the undergraduate classroom to facilitate deep structure learning (Roberts 1986, 2001, 2002). The exercises are designed for different levels of the undergraduate curriculum and adopt the strategies of…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…

A study explored the use of a text-copying task for the determination of syntactic constituent structure. It was predicted that the task would be a naturalistic, reasonably direct, and sensitive psycholinguistic research method. In two experiments, 70 subjects wrote out copies of typed passages. The points where they paused and looked back to the…

The developmental writing program at Northern Virginia Community College, Manassas Campus, deals with three concerns common to developmental writing teachers at two-year colleges. First, since most developmental writing teachers are unable to empathize with, or understand, their students, the Manassas program begins with exercises which acquaint…

This paper discusses the English verbal inflectional system within the lexicalist framework. A lexicalist approach to syntax is one in which all syntactic grammatical relations, lexical items, and the result of transformations are subject to semantic interpretation. That is, semantic information cannot be generated by syntactic rules. A filtering…

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

SOUND LANGUAGE TEACHING RESTS ON THREE THEORETICAL BASES. THE FIRST OF THESE, A HYPOTHESIS OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, MAY BE ORIENTED TOWARD THE COGNITIVE APPROACH OR THE PERCEPTIVE APPROACH OR MAY REFLECT THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE BEHAVIORIST. THE SECOND, A MODEL OF GRAMMAR, MAY BE THE PRODUCT OF THE TRADITIONALIST, THE STRUCTURALIST, THE…

ALL ORAL LANGUAGE DRILLS MAY BE SEPARATED INTO TWO TYPES--(1) MIM-MEM OR MIMICRY MEMORIZATION DRILLS OR (2) PATTERN PRACTICE DRILLS. THESE TWO LARGER CATEGORIES CAN BE SUB-DIVIDED INTO A NUMBER OF OTHER TYPES, SUCH AS TRANSFORMATION AND SUBSTITUTION DRILLS. THE USE OF ANY PARTICULAR TYPE DEPENDS ON THE PURPOSE TO WHICH THE DRILL IS PUT. IN ANY…

The study was designed to test the effects of a limited amount of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic development and overall writing ability of foreign students. Participants were freshmen studying English as a second language during an eight-week period. Twenty-four students were divided into a control and an experimental group. The…

This unit is intended to give ninth-grade students a brief survey of the changes in the study of language from the time of the Greeks to the present. Organized to proceed from the teacher's introduction of a subject to class examination and discussion of an excerpt from a grammarian's work, the unit focuses on the belief that a grammarian's…

This report presents some of the findings of several years research on the relations between the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas (NNE) and standard English (SE). The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary "be" in NNE. The approach to the problem combines the methods of…

FROM EITHER A FEAR OF STUDENTS OR A FEAR OF LANGUAGE AS IT ACTUALLY EXISTS, MANY ENGLISH TEACHERS HAVE PERMITTED GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS TO DOMINATE THE NEW ENGLISH CURRICULA AND CONSEQUENTLY HAVE MADE LINGUISTICS IRRELEVANT. THESE TEACHERS PREFER THE MANIPULATION OF GRAMMATICAL SYSTEMS AS AN END IN ITSELF RATHER THAN THE USE OF LINGUISTICS TO…