This book, a revised and expanded English version of the author's Italian work "La Linguistica strutturale" (1961), is a survey of the main trends in structural linguistics intended not only for the linguist but for specialists in other fields and the general reader as well. The initial chapter, "Introductory Notions," discusses general linguistic…

The claim that the best language teaching materials are based on a contrast of the two competing linguistic systems has long been a popular one in language teaching. It exists in strong and weak versions, the strong one arising from evidence from the availability of some kind of metatheory of contrastive analysis and the weak from evidence from…

"Advanced student" is defined here as the kind of student who can converse with native speakers and read simplified or simple English prose at reasonable rates with good comprehension. Such a student, however, is still not ready for university-level reading. The major problem for the teacher is not teaching English words but English structures.…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

Using methods developed in transformational generative grammar, three types of nominal constructions in Spanish are treated in this paper: Fact nominalizations ("[El] Escribir es agradable"), Manner nominalizations ("El tocar [de la mujer] es agradable"), and Abstract noun nominalizations ("La construccion rapida de esta escuela es dudosa"). While…

The objective of the current work program is to develop an on-line computer capability that would assist an information analyst in processing textual materials. The initial result of the work program is the design of a system for text processing and a computer implementation of a preliminary model of the system that strongly supports the validity…

In this paper several instances in which a mirror-image (or "directionless") rule was added intact to an innovating grammar are presented, and it is argued that the form of such rules can be constrained in a special way. The author has found it necessary to distinguish rules added to an innovating grammar (diachronic rules) from rules already…

By looking at the history of geometry and the concept of congruence in geometry we can get a new perspective on how to think about the closeness in meaning of two sentences. As in the analysis of congruence in geometry, a definite and concrete set of proposals about congruence of meaning depends essentially on the kind of theoretical framework…

This test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship existing between sentences that are similar in specific semantic content but different in syntactic structure. The test consists of twenty-five items of the three-option multiple-response type, with the stem of each item being a "pattern" sentence to be matched with one of the three…

The term generative phonolgy refers to statements, rules or axioms which can produce all but only those well-formed utterances of a language. The goal of this theory is to make precise and explicit the ability of native speakers to produce utterances of a particular language. In generative phonology, the level of the phoneme is redefined to match…

In order to discern whether sixth grade students with differing levels of reading achievement (as measured by the Paragraph Meaning subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test) also differed in the level of syntactic maturity evidenced in their response to a sentence combining task, a syntactic structure inventory of eight sentence-combining stimulus…

This volume explores objectively the essential characteristic of nine twentieth-century linguistic theories with the theoretical variant for discussion based on one closely representative of work within a given approach or usually associated with the name of the theory. First, the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure is discussed based on his book,…

In his attempt to give an account of language, the linguist is confronted by two interrelated problems: (1) the complexity of linguistic phenomena, and (2) the creativity of language. Although the proposal to study languages in terms of a generative system is not new, the basic technical concepts for carrying out such an undertaking were lacking…

The purpose of this experimental study was to determine whether instruction in generative grammar would produce better student writing. As a secondary aspect of the study, evaluation of all students was made for growth in knowledge of grammar apart from writing or other practical applications, whether the students had been instructed in generative…