Designed for use by composition students as well as teachers, the essays and background discussions in this book address themselves to questions of theory and practice in rhetoric. The book is divided into sections on invention, form, and style, and contains articles by such authors as Janet Emig, Wayne C. Booth, Richard L. Larson, Kenneth Burke,…

This article argues that QUE-deletion in Montreal French is a syntactic rule, rather than a phonological one, as earlier treatments had claimed. It is divided into five sections: (1) a discussion of why the rule accounting for the alternation of QUE with zero is a deletion, not an insertion rule, (2) a critique of the best known earlier…

Formal grammar study is important in schools above the elementary level because it can lead to improved understanding of the nature and functions of language. Although newer grammars, based on structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar, have not met the needs of the schools, their potential should not be ignored with a return…

This bibliography is divided into three main sections. The first section cites one bibliography relevant to discourse analysis. The second section cites books pertaining to discourse analysis, language structure, and transformational generative grammar. The third section refers to articles in the same areas. Entries include both American and…

This paper is a tentative description of several processes of complex sentence building in Bahasa Malaysia. Several types of embedding and conjoining are described, and some transformational rules are proposed whereby these are accomplished. Two informants, one from Selangor State and the other from Malacca State, were used for the study.…

A history of theories of transformational generative grammar is presented, and four theories are characterized as: Chomsky's initial theory, Chomsky's standard theory, the semantically-based theory, and finally Chomsky's nonstandard theory. The main issue appears to be the question of what determines sentence meaning. Specifically, it is stated…

The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

This study reflects the author's efforts to synthesize ideas drawn from various linguistic theorists, especially Schlesinger, Chomsky, and Fillmore. The first section gives the theoretical background for the study. The second section discusses roles, relations, and constructs. The final section discusses the applications of the study to teaching…

This volume, dedicated to Professor Robert B. Lees on the occasion of his departure from the University of Illinois, contains 15 papers on a variety of linguistic topics: C. L. Baker, "Problems of Polarity in Counterfactuals"; Lawrence F. Bouton, "Do So: Do+Adverb"; Chin-chuan Cheng, "Domains of Phonological Rule Application"; Joseph F. Foster,…

The oral reading miscues of 18 proficient readers, six each from grades 2, 4, and 6, were divided into those which did not change syntactic structure (nontransformation miscues) and those which did (retransformation miscues) and were analyzed through the use of the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues. The two groups of miscues were compared with…

This volume, the first of three dealing with a number of investigations and studies into the formal structure, advanced technology and application of large scale information processing systems, is concerned with the areas of compiler languages, natural languages and information storage and retrieval. The first report is entitled "Semantics and…

At present a computer system cannot be constructed for handling the totality of a natural language in any significant way. It is, however, possible to construct a system for communication in a narrow field of discourse. A working model for a specialized discourse based on a recognition grammar is discussed. Some properties of the recognition…

In order to mechanize the processing of natural language, the linguist must make the machine interpret the meaning, or semantic content of the language, in some way or other. This means that the machine should extract not only syntactic but also semantic information from the source sentence through the analysis of it. In this paper, the authors…

To find out what factors are involved in a child's learning of syntax, investigators studied the syntactic complexity of the language a mother and child use when talking to each other. The complexity measure used was one developed by Dr. Sheldon Frank and Dr. Harry Osser, and is based on the concepts of generative grammar and transformations.…

Recent experimental work in teaching standard English to speakers of nonstandard dialects of English has shown that such speakers often have a good receptive command of the standard dialect, and readily re-encode stimuli presented in the standard dialect into their own nonstandard forms. This fact shows that some modification is needed in the…