One of six related documents, making up a U.S. Air Force correspondence course, this publication deals with effective writing and emphasizes the sentence as the basic unit of written communication. Part one focuses on internal sentence punctuation and covers the use of the comma, semicolon, colon, period, capital, abbreviations, and numbers. Part…

A comparison is made between the modal verb systems of German and English with an emphasis on the interference caused by slight variations. (TL)

This paper discusses the importance of helping college composition students to become stylistically competent and cites a study that examined the essays of 32 college students and 27 skilled adult writers. T-unit measurements revealed that there is little difference between the groups in the number of clauses per T-unit, but the skilled writers…

Although intonation has been said to be one of the first meaningful units of language that a child acquires, it is difficult to say just what this really means. How does the child learn to distinguish the various grammatical meanings that an intonation can have? It was hypothesized that the child first acquires question and request forms on the…

Semantic readings of genitive constructions in Akan are discussed in relation to the position that semantic operative rules operate on surface structure and that positing deep structures or semantic structures for associative (genitive) constructions is unnatural and unnecessary. (AM)

This study investigates the relationship between social class membership and certain syntactic variables within a generative-transformational linguistic framework. Fourteen syntactic items are considered. Linguistic performance is more variable and complex within the higher ranking groups. (TL)

Event and factive causatives are distinguished. It is argued that ba-sentences in Mandarin Chinese are event causatives par excellence and that the ba and bei constructions, by deriving from the same underlying representation, can be shown to receive a unified account, if they are given a causative analysis. (Author/RM)

Part of the Grade Teacher special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

Complex conditional instructions ("if X, then do Y") are prevalent in public documents, where they typically appear in prose form. Results of two previous studies have shown that conditional instructions become very difficult to process as the structure becomes more complex. A study was designed to investigate whether this difficulty can…

A study was conducted to ascertain if the teaching of sentence building by means of specific sentence patterns would result in an increased use of these sentence patterns in the written compositions of second grade children. Writing samples were obtained from a group of second grade children both before and after the treatment and were analyzed…

Recently collected evidence shows the likely existence of twelve South American Indian languages with object-initial word order. This is contrary to what had been generally predicted in the literature on word order typology before 1977. Numerous examples are provided of OVS (Object-Verb-Subject) and OSV (Object-Subject-Verb) word order, primarily…

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

A study was undertaken to investigate which of ten constructions are available to children of various ages for expressing conditionality. A modified sentence completion test based on use of the ten constructions was designed, field-tested, and administered individually to 20 students in each of five grades: kindergarten and grades two, four, six,…

PART OF A SERIES OF FOUR RUSSIAN-ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF GRAMMARS OF IRANIAN LANGUAGES, THIS BOOKLET DESCRIBES THE TAJIK LANGUAGE OF THE INHABITANTS OF TAJIK SSR, AND IS THE FIRST TO APPEAR IN ENGLISH. (THE ORIGINAL TEXT WAS A SUPPLEMENT TO THE RAHIMI-USPENSKAYA "TAJIK-RUSSIAN DICTIONARY," MOSCOW, 1954.) ALL TAJIK FORMS ARE GIVEN IN…