The ergative construction is characteristic of all 37 languages of the Caucasian group. After definition of "subject" and "object," a summary is given of 13 Caucasian intransitive and transitive sentence-types, with respect to the case forms of their subjects and objects. The principal "symptoms" of ergativity are:…

Arguments for the introduction of an adverbial node label (ADV) in transformational grammar are examined and rejected. The following question is raised: Is a node label ADV necessary, or can the phenomena associated with adverbials be explained in terms of the set of node labels used to explain other areas of grammar? The author argues that a new…

Political language employed in serious inquiry differs systematically from language employed to promote loyalty to authority in respect to syntax; grammatical completeness and complexity; proportion of nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech; and forms of qualification. Formal language entails continuous effort at verfication or falsification and…

Having been taught for one year from a curriculum designed to enhance comprehension of syntactic structures, two groups (experimental and control) of fourth grade students were tested by two special cloze instruments to examine the effect of the curriculum on the comprehension of syntactic structures which the students encountered in reading.…

This report reviews the psychological and psycholinguistic literature from the last decade that deals with memory for sentences. It is concluded that the encoded representation of a sentence reflects both syntactic and semantic content, with the semantic content being far less transient. (Author)

A study made to examine the development in production of the English verbal auxiliary and copula (VAC) "to be" compared a group of children with language dysfunction and a group of normal children. Two purposes were to see whether developmental differences are qualitative or quantitative and to calculate the importance of the VAC in language…

The class of English words traditionally called adverbs is examined and redefined in this paper. The following three subclasses of adverbs are identified: limiters, which are words that modify noun phrases; intensifiers, which are words that modify adjectives; and "true" adverbs, which modify verb phrases and sentences. Examples of these…

It has been demonstrated (in the research described here) that people hearing sentences on a tape recording process underdetermined sentences differently than people hearing them in a conversation. It has been shown that this difference is caused by the presence of underdetermined elements but not ordinary transformations. The effect of ordinary…

This study attempts to bring together most of the information about the transformational analysis of the grammar of English that was available up through the summer of 1968, and to integrate it into a single coherent format. The format chosen is that of C. Fillmore (the "Deep Case" hypothesis) combined with the "Lexicalist" hypothesis of N.…

The 190 titles described here have been selected to provide a convenient reference guide for students of language who are concerned with regional and social variations in Southern speech. The area covered is not only that of the eleven states of the historical South, but Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia as well. The only specific aim of the…

The word "que" is used in Spanish both as a relative pronoun and as a conjunction. As a relative pronoun it can be singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, indefinite, or variable and can by its use in modifying persons and objects serve as a subject or a complement. The relative "que" can precede articles and prepositions. As a conjunction,…

This "new English grammar" textbook blends four systems of grammar: (1) the traditional, providing most of the terminology; (2) the historical, providing the historical background; (3) the structural, providing the sentence patterns; and (4) the transformational, providing the variations of the sentence patterns. The author points out the…

The present book is an introduction to Mongolian, designed to give the most essential information about that language to nonspecialists in the field, primarily to linguists who are interested in learning about the structure, or students of Mongolian who wish to get a general picture of the language before they begin studying it in detail.…

In the second volume of this two volume document (See TE 002 130.), Thomas Shroyer, in "Aesthetic Theory and Linguistic Investigation," explores the connections between linguistic inquiry and the art theory of Susanne Langer. He attempts to provide the understanding necessary for the teaching of literary art as one product of linguistic…

In this paper the author examines the "encoding-decoding" model of speaking and understanding English. He reviews in detail an objection to the model: that it was specifically designed with a view to incorporating linguistic theories, such as syntax, into it. As a result, what it more or or less accurately represents is the relation…