Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets…

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions)…

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

Background: Receptive language impairments in school-age children have a poor prognosis, yet there is a dearth of research on effective interventions. Aims: Children's responses to a computerized grammatical training program were evaluated to consider whether repeated responding to spoken sentences with variable semantic content and the same…

Purpose: This investigation expands the notion of academic language to extracurricular activities and provides preliminary data regarding linguistic expectations that are placed on students who are participating in youth sports. Method: Five coaches of young girls' basketball teams (2 competitive; 3 recreational) were observed during practice…

We present a set-theoretic model of the mental representation of classically quantified sentences (All P are Q, Some P are Q, Some P are not Q, and No P are Q). We take inclusion, exclusion, and their negations to be primitive concepts. We show that although these sentences are known to have a diagrammatic expression (in the form of the Gergonne…

The humanities department of the community college where the author teaches has a long-standing policy regarding the demand for sentence-structure correctness in all the composition courses that they provide. That policy holds students accountable for total control over the rules that govern sentence structure. Any student paragraph or essay that…

This paper describes a demonstration of a totally integrated discovery procedure to present sentence-combining practice. This practice makes students aware not only of the complex structures but of the usage and style related to each structure. Guidelines for the execution of the practice include: (1) the use of a sequence of questions by the…

First in a series of books that illustrate the functions of words in sentences, this book uses cartoon characters (a different "Humpty" for each part of speech) to help make learning grammar easier by associating an abstract concept with a visual image. The book introduces each part of speech and offers practice pages where students can reinforce…

Grammar can have meaning and be of use to the learner depending upon the methods of instruction that are being used. The eight traditional parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverbs, prepositional phrase, conjunction, pronouns, and interjection) can be made useful for learners by giving concrete, semi-concrete, and abstract examples when…

A study investigated young children's knowledge of the constraint that prevents questioning from a position inside a temporal adjunct: i.e., knowledge of the ungrammaticality of a question such as "Who did Fred kiss Sue before hugging...?" Subjects were 30 children aged 3 to 5 years, who listened to stories accompanied by pictures and…

The assumption that language is used solely to convey information with the maximum efficiency is refuted with examples of expository prose. Eight brief samples of expository prose are examined in order to demonstrate the use of syntactic euphemism to manipulate communication in complex and subtle ways. Syntactic euphemism involves the use of the…

Transcripts of 24 spontaneous speech samples from 2 year old children are analyzed for use of nouns and pronouns in sentences. (Author/DEP)

This study attempts to develop a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 48 children (aged 5 and 7) varied as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. (Author/GO)

Patients with cortical lesions, both with or without aphasia, were asked to reconstruct sentences. It was found that syntactic comprehension deficits exist only in aphasics. Two groups are distinguishable, those with deficits due to problems of repetition and those with deficits due to problems of object recognition. (Text is in French.) (TL)