A review of Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammar by Lois Bloom. (DS)

From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances, and differences in frequency of structures were examined. (Author)

Reviews some of the principal phenomena that have been found to characterize the acquisition of word meaning during the first two years of life, and proposes a theoretical framework which can be used to interpret these phenomena. (MP)

Although both 14 language impaired and 14 normal young children showed greater comprehension and production of words referring to objects than to actions, this tendency was not as marked for the language impaired Ss. (CL)

Describes and analyzes in detail the form and function of the English construction "as + participle", called the participle construction of characterization, or PCC. (EKN)

Presents study of elocutionary forces behind indirect speech acts, such as rhetorical questions, in English and Italian, by using contrastive analysis of form, frequency distribution of questions, and uses and negativity of rhetorical questions. Concludes the rhetorical questions in English and Italian, and perhaps many more languages, may be…

Discusses study which looked at the variance from target language norms in second-language behavior which arises in semantic information in individual words. Results suggest that study of grammar as a knowledge of basic lexical classifications requires little attention because work class identifications learned in L1 are smoothly transferred to…

The effectiveness of training a semantic integration strategy for recall of pictograph sequences and the generalization of the strategy to a related oral sentence task were examined in 60 kindergarten prereaders. (Author/MP)

The progressive in English is a grammatical form which is based on a distinction between stative and dynamic situations. It is used for actions and events that are regarded as incomplete or developing. Suggests this distinction should guide organization of the teaching of the progressive in the ESL classroom. (Author/BK)

Reviews three Italian-French dictionaries recently published in Italy comparing them with an older one. States that all three mark a definite progress compared to the latter, for the variety and abundance of examples and the coverage of phraseology, but finds them lacking in the areas of syntactic and semantic information. (MES)

Introduces Hervey's axiomatic semantic theory as one that contains the fundamental Saussurian notion of "sign" and is based on a global view of language. Discusses the mutual dependence of semantic theory and linguistic theory, and states the conditions of applicability of the former in terms of formal, empirical, and methodological…

Johnson-Laird's reply to Fodor's book, Language of Thought (LOT) and to Fodor's position on Tom Swift often missed the point or were out of context. Doctrines expressed in LOT were quite compatible with those cited in Tom Swift. (RD)

Examines the lexicographic definition as an informal analysis of the meanings of words. (AM)