The author describes a reading program based on James Dinnan's theory of how people learn. This unique program teaches both highly inefficient readers and those with milder developmental needs to deal effectively with practical and literary prose and with poetry. (Author)

An assignment to write a comment in less than fifty words encourages conciseness and precision. (JH)

A comparison is made of two different approaches to the treatment of modals in the framework of a transformational grammar--that of Seuren, who analyzes modals as "operators," and that of the generative semanticists who take them to be "higher verbs." Implications for language teaching are discussed. (Author/RM)

Examines the verification of false sentences of the form "All S are P." It was found that the number of properties shared by the subject and predicate concept of the sentence was directly proportional to reaction time. These findings question the assumption that only property relations are prestored in memory. (Author/EJS)

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)

English modal verbs constitute a problem for the student of English as a foreign language. This study presents a methodology for a systematic presentation of the meaning of modal verbs. The modals "can,""may,""must," and "have to" are studied. (SW)

Four categories of statements are isolated in an attempt to analyze relationships between voice, tense and use of auxiliaries in French. The deep structure theory of generative grammar is questioned and a theory of semantic distinctions operating within the forms of a language is proposed. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A summary of problems in the study of structural complexity. Within the framework of a "morphology of utterances," the following topics are addressed: the criteria of intuition and common sense; the relationship of complexity of language and thought; and the possibility of a purely linguistic measure of complexity. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

The organization of repair in a corpus of conversations in the Lue, Yuan (or Myang), and Siamese dialects of Tai is examined with regard to the preference for self-correction described previously for an English corpus. In both, repair is an identically organized sequential phenomenon involving repair segments during conversation. (CHK)

This paper formulates a semantic distinction between predicates in Japanese which take indirect questions and those which cannot, and advances a hypothesis that the former crucially involve in their semantics the absence, acquisition, presence, and loss of information relevant in certain ways. (Author)

Nominalization of possessive sentences in Russian is discussed. It is maintained that all lexical surface items originate as terms in a situation model, and that their actualization as different parts of speech is language-specific. Language data are used to support a locative interpretation of the semantic model. (CHK)