An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to…

A survey of 968 sentences from 20 different college texts used by freshman students revealed that active sentences were the most prevalent of sentence types. Next in order were passives, gerunds, pseudo clefts, factives, infinitives, and clefts. The author found that students made mistakes more frequently in distinguishing actives from passives…

While the prenominal or postnominal position of descriptive adjectives in Spanish has been widely discussed, there is a partial aspect of this topic which is either ignored or dealt with in a perfunctory manner, namely, the possible existence of a semantic principle determining the sequence of descriptive adjectives in coordinate series of two or…

Generalized recognition of the kernel, passive, negative, and passive-negative transformations of a number of sentences was investigated. A significant amount of generalization was obtained within a transformationally-defined sentence family relative to the generalization obtained between sentence families when subjects were requested to register…

This article discusses the problem that arises in forming tag questions when the subject of the sentence contains "every,""none,""some," or "any." (CFM)

A system called Text-ray has been successfully employed to improve students' writing skills. (Author/MLF)

Children between the ages of 6 and 11 learn to understand and use the relative pronouns "qui" and "que." The closer the subordinate clause is to favorite word order, the easier it is for the child. (MLA)

It is proposed that speech rhythm, adapted to needs of written language, should constitute the basis of sound punctuation. It is the failure to recognize this principle that has led some writers to recommend a punctuation system that is mechanical rather than natural and meaningful. (CHK)

Children's books contributee to language development by employing the teaching techniques of sentence repetition and expansion. (DD)

Argues that the nonfuture use of "will" has exactly the same semantic structure as the future "will," and that the basic meaning of "will" is potential rather than future. (Author/HP)

An examination of the predicates "optional" and "obligatory" is made that suggests that they are far more appropriately viewed as derived rather than primitive notions, whose appropriate attributions follow in all cases from independent linguistic facts and principles of a much more general and more generally significant character. (Author/HP)

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers to our utterance of it, and has a higher performative clause of the form "I plus Verb plus You." This paper deals with data that have been used to support this analysis, and shows that they do not confirm it. (CHK)

Examines summaries of expository text written by undergraduate students to discover the nature of text-to-summary mapping. Finds that simple omission and one-to-one mapping of text sentences into summary sentences were the most favored strategies. (FL)

Presents a structural definition of the basic sentence unit, and suggests some guidelines for teaching this material. This concept of "X-word Grammar" has proven to be very helpful to students encountering difficulty with the concept of a sentence. (SL)

Identifies the characteristics of clear references to explain why certain kinds of broad pronoun reference are clear while others are not. (HTH)