Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

This study investigates whether other relationships in sentence structure besides the "brother-in-law" relation sanction surrogate agreement in Zinacanteco Tzotzil (Mayan). Surrogate agreement refers to cases in which an element that lies outside the class of regular agreement controllers in a language (the surrogate) controls…

The innovative use of a visual cueing device, or rods, in a second language class to represent the parts of speech and the grammatical structure of a sentence is explained and illustrated. The advantages found in it are that individual structures are not learned as isolated elements but rather as parts of a larger system, and that there is more…

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Part II of a continued article. (DD)

An experiment was carried out to determine how the memory search of a two-clause complex sentence in immediate memory is carried out. An item-recognition task was performed with 32 native English-speaking, right-handed adults who listened to eight two-clause complex sentences presented to the left ear, each immediately followed by a probe word…

The Commission of the European Communities has acquired an automatic translation system (SYSTRAN), which has been put into operation on an experimental basis. The system covers translation of English into French and comprises a dictionary for food science and technology containing 25,000 words or inflections and 4,500 expressions. This report…

The syntax of adult expressive language is compared to that of child pre-language. This "syntactical regression" is considered part of the dynamic and evolutionary character of human language. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The language behavior of field-dependent and field-independent female college students was examined in three different communication conditions with respect to length and type of verbal output. The conditions were dialogue, warm monologue, and cold monologue. (Author/AM)

Deals with clause chaining in Washkuk, a language spoken by about 2500 people in northeastern New Guinea. Four clause types are ranked from lowest to highest. Any clause subordinates all preceding clauses of lower order. (TL)

Mainly concerned with where negative questions in Chinese originate.An abstract treatment allows the derviation of all questions from a general underlying structure with disjunctive pattern and accounts for the discordance between the answer to a negative question and its answer particle. (Author/RM)