Background: Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with…

The purpose of this study was to assess the roles of oral language and phonological awareness on reading performance in grade 3 bilingual students. Several hierarchical models assessed the best predictors of third grade English and Spanish word attack, word identification and reading comprehension. Predictor variables were measures of phonological…

"If"-conditionals are a highly valuable resource in academic discourses, whether spoken or written, as they can be used to hypothesize, hedge, manage interaction with the addressee, and promote or on the contrary circumscribe the scope of research claims. This article analyses how "if"-conditionals are brought into play in three genres of medical…

Background: Previous studies of outcome for children with early language delay have focused on measures of early language as predictors of language outcome. This study investigates whether very early processing skills (VEPS) known to underpin language development will be better predictors of specific language and social communication outcomes than…

Investigates the assumption that sentences comprise a presupposition and an assertion. The projection problem for presuppositions is reduced to a property of presuppositions; intersentential relations are systematized, dependent on presupposition and negation; certain syntactic structures and lexical items are analyzed in terms of these relations.…

A technique is demonstrated whereby an implicit semantic feature can be related to a grammatical alternative (pronoun-antecedent assignment) and thereby made explicit. It is also demonstrated that pragmatic, syntactic and other semantic features interact in an orderly way with this implicit feature of causality in verbs. (RC)

Polar interrogative sentences differ from declarative sentences in terms of illocutionary forces and the linguistic analysis of their meaning. It is possible to isolate small numbers of syntactic and semantic categories and an unlimited number of illocutionary forces resulting from their interaction with the total situation. (CK)

It is argued that among English sensation referents there is a primacy of vision referents for syntactic, semantic and morphological phenomena. (RM)

Critically comments on the renovations made by the Royal Spanish Academy in their newest outline of Spanish grammar (Esbozo de una nueva Gramatica de la lengua espanola). (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

Discusses three different patterns of restrictive and non-restrictive prepositional relative clauses--their functions, variations and permitted uses. (CK)

This paper examines the basic properties of subject and object in Arabic and characterizes them through their grammatical manifestation in a relational network. The study also investigates the relational properties of subject and object with respect to other grammatical notions such as relativization, reflexivization, and passivization. Data for…

The axiomatic functionalist approach to linguistic analysis, in which, by definition, syntactic relationships are asymmetrical and morphological relationships are symmetrical, provides the framework for a discussion of the grammatical identity of the definite article "al" in Arabic as either morphemic or syntactic. Criteria for the…

The performance of Icelandic-speaking children on the comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender was investigated. Eighty children ranging in age from 4-8 years were tested. It was hypothesized that if children rely primarily on formal information for determing grammatical gender, they should perform equally well on both natural and syntactic…

To determine how many occurrences of a syntactic structure are necessary to provide sampling reliability, two one-half hour spontaneous language samples were elicited from each of 15 language disordered students (5 to 6 years old). Sessions were divided into two periods, one for the child's telling about pictures and toys and the other for…

Transitivity in the English verb is examined from the perspectives of the linguistic theorist and the second language instructor. English verbs can be assigned to one of six categories: pure intransitives, causative-inchoative verbs, psych-movement verbs, cross-classification verbs, direct object deletions, and pure transitives. Both syntacticians…