The concept of the verb phrase in natural and programming languages is discussed. (RM)

Quantifiers are discussed and evidence presented for their existential character in some cases. Their relation to surface and underlying structure is discussed. (RM)

A study examined cohesive reference in a newspaper report of a law case, with the intention of helping students read such texts. Occurrences of two classes of items signaling referential cohesion were analyzed: personals (personal pronouns and possessive adjectives) and demonstratives (including the definite article). Factors that might lead a…

The Macedonian verb form corresponding to the form ending in "-l" in French is examined, focusing on the active past participle, which represents the past indeterminate or non-testimonial tense. Special attention is paid to aspectual, modal, temporal, and prosodic values, and all examples are drawn from the two languages. (MSE)

It is proposed that the functions of the Mandarin verbal suffix "-le" are three: (1) for marking non-continual factual actions or events; (2) for indicating the "peak" in an event line; and (3) for explicitly marking anteriority of an action or event. Observations of written language drawn from newspaper articles and…

It is argued that too much attention to deep structure has led to neglect of surface realizations. Case relations and case forms are studied as well as the relationships between the two. (Text is in French.) (AM)

A study was conducted in which a series of stories was used to teach six four- to five-year-olds to identify objects as "nouns," attributes of objects as "adjectives," and actions as "verbs." All the children appeared to have well-formed semantic fields for the three form classes. (Author/RM)

IN THIS SECOND VOLUME (CHAPTER V) OF A THREE-PART SERIES ON HAUSA SYNTAX, THE EMPHASIS IS ON THE FUNCTION RATHER THAN THE FORM OF WORDS. (THE FIRST VOLUME DISCUSSES SYNTAX AND THE THIRD DEALS WITH SPECIFIC TEXTS.) IN ADDITION TO THOROUGH TREATMENT OF THE PARTICULAR HAUSA FUNCTION WORDS, A SMALL GROUP OF WORDS WITH FREQUENT OCCURRENCE AND HIGHLY…

PRESENTED IN THIS PAPER IS A SIMPLIFIED DESCRIPTION OF AN ALGORITHM FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH SENTENCES. IT IS NEITHER ASSUMED NOR IMPLIED IN THIS ALGORITHM THAT ANY KIND OF PRIOR ANALYSIS (EITHER STRING OR CONSTITUENT ANALYSIS) IS REQUIRED AS A PREREQUISITE. IN ORDER TO DEFINE THE SET OF ALL TRANSFORMS, THE AUTHORS FIRST DEFINE A…

IN THIS EXPERIMENT ERRORS WERE SYSTEMATICALLY INTRODUCED INTO A SERIES OF SENTENCES TO STUDY THEIR EFFECT ON RECOGNITION AND RECALL OF THE SENTENCES. THE SUBJECTS, 32 ADULTS, WERE SHOWN SLIDES OF SENTENCES CONTAINING A SINGLE ERROR ("THE IMPATIENT COMPOSED A SYMPHONY FOR THE ORCHESTRA") AS WELL AS CONTROL SENTENCES WITHOUT ERRORS. THE VIEWING TIME…

Class in Bantu and its syntactic significance is discussed with reference to gender in Indo-European and semantic/syntactic features of nouns. On the basis of modern Bantu evidence and the comparative method, a maximum of 21 classes have been posited for proto-Bantu. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto-Bantu and…

This paper examines the meaning and functions of the directional suffixes (adverbial expressions of direction) in Kusaiean and Ponapean. It is shown that the directional suffixes have two semantic features of direction and terminus. Depending on the different contexts in which they are used, sometimes only one semantic feature is employed and…

The discussion of Spanish verbs considers the problems of tense and aspect. Two tenses are used in the description: past and non-past. The past tense is considered the marked member and the non-past the unmarked member. Aspect is considered in terms of "telic" verbs which express an action tending towards a goal, and "atelic" verbs which do not…

Two Japanese causal connectives, "kara" and "node," are often assumed by linguists to share many distributional similarities. This paper argues that they are in fact based on semantically or logically different assumptions. The paper reviews some past treatments of the connectives and suggests an alternative analysis in terms…