Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the speech of mothers and fathers as they interacted with their children in a similar setting. Specifically, the study compared mothers' and fathers' speech patterns in interactions with their preschool children, focusing on utterance length, sentence types, and word frequencies. Speech samples were…

The difficulty of understanding embedded sentences is discussed in relation to Bever's hypothesis: if a sentence segment has a double function by means of the same processing strategy it is difficult to interpret the sentence. An alternative to this theory is proposed due to the author's experiments. (SCC)

Discusses the difficulty of describing the linguistic approach to the study of language to a non-linguist. Points out certain differences between traditional grammar, structural analysis and contemporary language analysis and gives a short description of the notion of generative grammar. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

An argument is made for a theory of deep structure which does not neglect surface structure analysis. See FL 508 197 for availability. (RM)

An analysis is made of three "wh" words -- what, which, and who -- which are most frequently used as interrogative and relative pronouns in English. An attempt is made to find some formal syntactic markers distinguishing these two uses and consequently to postulate distinct feature matrices for them. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

Some of the new statistical research of Wladimir D. Admoni and the language typology work of Winfred P. Lehmann is presented. It is then shown that the results of the two methods can be put together to bring forth new knowledge about the present-day tendencies of German syntax. (Text is in German.) (TL)

The following aspects of syntax in Indian English are examined: complex sentence formation, interrogative transformation, verb forms, and complementation. It is argued that a set of syntactic rules exists in all non-native second language varieties of English that will generate the non-stylistic deviant patterns discussed. (KM)

Intended for use by students at any level above grade 2, this practice book helps students recognize and correct sentence fragments, edit sentences for subject-verb agreement, use nouns and pronouns correctly, use present and past tense, and capitalize and punctuate sentences and abbreviations. The book also introduces students to the correct…

Most students today have been reared on television and have had only slight brushes with the parts of grammar. Nevertheless, a variety of sentence pattern exercises and sentence combining lessons based on the students' own writing can be used to augment, challenge and improve students' writing skills and vocabulary. In the first exercise, students…

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

To gain a sense of good rhetorical structure, what students of writing in English as a second language need to do is not to practice writing paragraphs and essays conforming to particular patterns, but rather to recognize and understand the resources available for indicating relationships between the propositions that make up their own, unique…

Statistical analyses of the incidence of "what"-questions requiring variably complex responses are presented. The responses were asked of a bilingual child by different sets of caretakers in English and German over a one-year period starting at age 16 months. Results show that the caretakers' questions are geared first toward the child's…

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…