This material was designed to present the essential features of English phrase and clause structure, for the benefit of both native speakers and learners of English as a second language. The author has followed a "deliberately eclectic" approach. The diagrams are developments of the type discussed and exemplified in Hockett, 1958, and…

The purpose of this study was to analyze differences in children's written questions by means of the theoretical model of transformational-Generative grammar. Eight questions written by children in grades 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 comprised the nucleus of this study. The eight questions were chosen from a larger group of questions and separated into…

A preliminary study of the syntactic characteristics of the imperative construction in modern Chinese is presented. The term "imperative" is used to refer to the type of syntactic construction which is marked by an implicit or explicit second person subject, and which expresses a direct command. Indirect or implied commands expressed by a…

Current linguistic theories, such as interpretive and generative semantics, are judged theoretically unsound and practically unsuitable for pedagogical purposes. Although the concept of case must be included in a grammar, current case theories are also rejected. The concept of case is redefined, as are the defining criteria for each case. A noun…

This report describes the proceedings of a conference that brought together 20 psychologists and psycholinguists to present their particular research interests and to attempt to find communalities of thinking through discussion of "The Perception of Language." One position held that thinking is merely subvocal speech, and that at the base of all…

The author addresses the need for a new acoustic recognition strategy, extending the position that any adequate grammar of a language must distinguish between auditory and articulatory knowledge. Reviewing the existing literature and theories of language and its acquisition, the author discusses their limitations and inadequacies in accounting for…

A heuristic strategy model of sentence comprehension, similar to ones suggested by Bever, Fodor and Garret, is discussed, with the focus on the conceptual characteristics of such a model and on relevant research. Briefly, the model assumes that a speech perception device constructs a representation of a heard sentence corresponding roughly to a…

This curriculum guide describes courses and provides some sample lesson plans for an English program for eighth and ninth grade students. All of the students are required to take a basic writing course for the first nine weeks of the semester. For the next nine weeks some students receive large group instruction in linguistics and the other…

Describes a program for understanding and generating natural language which handles paragraph-length imput. Its core, "preference semantics," a system of preferential choice between deep semantic patterns, is contrasted with: (1) syntax-oriented linguistic approaches, and (2) theorem-proving approaches to understanding. Available from…

A context-sensitive, generative lexical rule model is developed that is capable of overcoming the insufficiencies of both the transformationalist and the lexicalist approaches to work formation, e.g., semantic-syntactic asymmetry, metaphoric usage, and restricted rule productivity. (DB)

Argues that generative phonology is not predictive of phonological identification, thus preventing it from achieving descriptive adequacy and limiting its value in explaining human speech perception. The assumption that the unity of the morpheme must be expressed phonologically is rejected. (Author/EJS)

This article reviews and criticizes Fay's particular transformational descriptions as implausible. (Author/NCR)

This article presents recent representative structural, eclectic, transformational, and semantic analyses of the subjunctive. A different theory is presented that states that there is but a single common rule for the use of the subjunctive and the indicative in all of their occurrences, both in independent and main clauses. (Author/NCR)

It is argued here that English contains a distinct class of relative clauses called amount relatives. On the surface, these are much like restrictive relative clauses, but they have a syntax and semantics that align them more with comparatives than with restrictive relatives. (Author/KM)