This paper explores the potential conflict classroom teachers face in their dual roles as "guardians of grammar" and as "agents of social language reform" with reference to third person singular generic pronouns in English. We investigate to what extent teachers (primary, secondary and tertiary) experience tensions between…

As a new faculty member, the author was invited by colleagues to help protect a resource they believed was essential to their instructional program. The importance of teaching grammar in a didactic fashion as a precursor to student writing constituted an unchallenged belief in the department. Faculty members were committed to the notion that…

This paper reports on an investigation about the relation between a student's conscious awareness of the structure of a sentence and the degree of his/her intonation accuracy as well as his/her reading comprehension. The research was done based on the hypothesis that: "if the students are made conscious of the infrastructure of lengthy…

This paper looks at the acquisition of articles and related nominal functional properties (the status of classifier, the singular-plural distinction) in English and French by native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese. Two experimental studies are reported. In the generative SLA literature, there is disagreement as to which properties of the grammar…

This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…

A study of Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria, focuses on the system of constraints governing tonal processes. Specifically, it examines the ways in which general processes of low tone raising and high tone lowering are realized in domains constructed by verbs and by preverbal auxiliary and adverbial constituents. Sequentially…

The typology of VSO (verb-subject-object) languages cannot be explained in terms of the syntactic theory (Government and Binding theory) that governs the more common SVO languages. It is considered that VSO languages might be derived from underlying SVO structure. This idea, known as the SVO Hypothesis, is presented as a paradigm to which examples…

This book of supplemental exercises is one of a series of books designed to provide educational materials for students in addition to the instructional texts in the Adult Learning Skills Program. Exercises in this basic level book are for the English subject area. Course numbers and exercise topics are: 301 (subjects and predicates, sentence…

A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their…

A study of young children's assignment of nouns to gender categories and general mastery of the Icelandic gender system is reported. An examination of what is involved in the induction of formal categories such as gender introduces the proposal of a "principle of localness." This principle states that the closer in proximity a closed…

A case study was undertaken to examine the influence of one aspect of signed grammar, transparency of reference of some signs, on the acquisition of possessive pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL). The subject was a hearing child of deaf parents who was learning ASL and English. Data were collected in home visits betwen the ages of 1.1 and 3.2…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…

THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE IS CONSIDERED AS A QUESTION OF SPECIFYING HOW CHILDREN'S CAPACITY FOR LANGUAGE INTERACTS WITH THEIR LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE--THE INTERACTION TAKING THE FORM OF RELATING THE UNIVERSAL ASPECTS OF THE DEEP STRUCTURE TO THE IDIOSYNCRATIC ASPECTS OF THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. THIS INTERACTION OCCURS IN THE ACQUISITION…

This summary gathers together for easy reference the inflected forms of Literary Sinhala together with a transliteration guide to the writing system. This work differs, therefore, from the authors' previous work, "Literary Sinhala" (1974), which presented the inflected forms in a pedagogical sequence. In this summary, the inflected forms…