The 17 lessons in this book are based on transformational grammar theory, but they are not designed to teach grammar--not even transformational grammar theory. The authors have used them with students who speak a variety of non-standard English and who have previously been unsuccessful in English classes. These students would write little or…

The contrasting views of Saussure and Bloomfield ("mentalist" versus "mechanist"), the hypotheses of Whorf showing the influence of language on certain habits of thought, and Chomsky's notion of generative transformational grammar in the context of language use are reviewed. The author notes the limits of these systems and suggests that in dealing…

Section I of this report discusses the theoretical issues relating to the development of syntax recognition routines based on psychological models of human speech recognition and reviews the relevant psychological literature. The research reported deals with attempts to relate various syntactic variables to measures of the perceptual complexity of…

The author raises the question of how to relate modern transformational grammars to a body of empirical fact, and suggests why paraphrasing might legitimately be considered a feature of behavior relevant to linguistic competence. This study is introduced by a discussion of the empirical basis of descriptive linguistics, followed by sections…

The augmented transition network described in this report was developed in the course of work in semantic interpretation in the context of a computer system which answers English questions. In order to provide mechanical input for the semantic interpreter, a parsing program based on the notion of a "recursive transition network grammar" was…

The individual components of language -- on the semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels -- mean little or nothing as individual constructs. Language research must proceed according to a concept of linguistic structure which reflects the correlation of elements within and between levels of structure. (VM)

Reflexives in Japanese and English show a number of interesting differences. Morphologically, there is a single form "jibun" ("jishin") in Japanese, which does not vary for person or number. In English there are various forms which always agree in person and number ("myself,""himself,""themselves,"…

The theory is presented that there are in Indo-European languages only two comparative morphemes and correspondingly two degrees of the comparative, superiority and equality. (RM)

A discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs in Russian leads to the conclusion that the question of transitivity rests primarily with the meaning of the verb itself and with the resulting amenability to passive transformation. (Author/RM)

Most students seem not to have learned the transformational grammar their teachers said had been taught.

Argues that verbal prefixes in Hungarian should not be assigned to a specific category of their own, but should be analyzed as belonging to the category of postpositions. (Author/AM)

Examines Marr's and Stalin's opposing views on language, and shows how these ideas may be re-examined in the light of generative grammar and sociolinguistics. (AM)

The analysis predicts the distribution of cleft-like sentence types whose introducing particle is "this" or "that" rather than "it," and asserts a correlation between judgements of grammaticality of pseudo clefts and sentences containing free relatives. (Author/NCR)

The author accepts some of the technical comments in Dresher and Hornstein's article on artificial intelligence (AI), (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December 1976), but disagrees with several other comments. Although Dresher and Hornstein unquestioningly adopt Noam Chomsky's paradigm for the study of language, their real point is that AI researchers are…

This paper explores the interrelationship of syntax and semantics in two types of Verb-Verb construction in Mandarin, namely, resultative verb compounds and directional verb compounds. Evidence shows that resultative verbs are actually made up of different classes of Verb-Verb constructions, possessing specific semantic implications. (CHK)