Rhetorical and linguistic concepts of the sentence are reviewed in the course of introducing the concept of the "minor sentence" (sentence fragments which may occur alone as complete linguistic utterances or which may be combined by parataxis or coordinators with a major sentence). Rather than restraining beginning writers from using…

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task, in this case, memorization of a sentence and providing a continuation for a sentence. (AM)

Describes, adducting many examples, the external relative clause, discussing it from the pedagogical standpoint. This type of clause, belonging to normal speech, and not being merely a stylistic matter, belongs in the basic course. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Utilizing careful, empirical definitions of lesson kinetic structure, the authors tested two hypotheses: student content achievement is directly related to lesson content structure; and, awareness of commonality and theme development is directly related to lesson content structure. Student achievement seems to be related to communication…

Examines several subtypes of the verbal sequency NP-VP1-VP2 in Chinese, especially those involving descriptions of human action, directed motion, and instrumental functions, and finds that these could be subsumed under the heading of "purposive clauses." The VP1 states an action whose goal is fulfilled by the action performed in VP2. (Author/RM)

Deals with certain problems inherent in deriving anaphoric pronouns from bound variables. Syntactic rules applied to determine anaphora relations cannot be applied if anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents have identical underlying forms. An approach to anaphora which preserves some advantages of the bound-variable theory without the problems is…

The writing of ESL students, while sophisticated in some respects, often contains fragments and run-ons. Because these students have no reliable, self-monitoring system for analyzing their writing and because they believe they are communicating effectively, they fail to recognize their difficulties in forming complete sentences. This paper…

This paper challenges the characterization of bilingual behavior derived from the code-switching model, and especially the notion of linguistic independence on which psychological studies of bilingualism have focused almost exclusively. While linguists have concentrated on the situational determinants of code-switching, psychologists have focused…

Reading teachers of the 1980s need to be confident not only about the key issues but also about their own knowledge of the issues when making decisions. Two issues from the seventies (reading as a developmental process and reading as a psycholinguistic process) combine with the broad notion of textlinguistics as important areas of knowledge for…

This document traces the history of sentence combining, from Ney's study in 1966 and Mellon's study in 1969 to recent research conducted by Ney and supported by the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. Studies by O'Hare (1973), Ney (1975), Combs (1975), Perron (1974), Green (1972), Hunt and O'Donnell (1969), Miller…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

This research deals with how extraction rules are constrained in cases where their unconstrained application would give rise to semantic ambiguity. Of particular concern is the application of extraction rules to noun phrases (NP's) where word order is the only indication of the different syntactic functions of two adjacent NP's. Samples from…