Presenting extensive entertaining explanations of the rules of punctuation, this revised and expanded book offers advice on punctuation and a "bizarre comedy of manners." Whimsical illustrations and the travails of numerous fictional characters accompany explanations of the rules of punctuation. Chapters in the book address the…

A modified language arts curriculum has resulted from the contributions of linguists. Language arts teachers need to be thoroughly versed in content and methodology recommendations made by linguists. It is important for pupils to understand patterns of sentences in the English language. Pupils should also attach meaning to the concept of expanding…

An analysis of adverbial placement in written contemporary English focuses not on the sentence or clause context, as in conventional analyses, but on the textual or discoursal influences on placement. Specifically, the study examines: (1) the major textual and discoursal motivations behind clause-initial placement of adverbials of time and place…

This paper proposes an explanation for the limited possibilities of realized conjunctions in multitermed coordinations. It argues that conjunction "&" heads a fully articulated phrase (&P), which can iterate &P shells, similar to "V" in Larson's (1988) VP-shell hypothesis. This structure enables a single & to unify any number of conjuncts, and…

Describes an evolutionary compositional theory and method based on cause and effect. In Section I, the fundamentals of the theory are presented, in Section II the method of description. Section III compares the evolutionary theory and method with other currents in contemporary linguistic thought. (Author/RM)

Personal/impersonal negative sentence pairs in Russian are discussed. It is concluded that the structural differences in personal and impersonal negative sentences correspond to a difference in meaning: the absence of the object in general versus the absence of a given, specified object. (Author/RM)

Review of some syntactic problems concerning the use of French pronouns. (PMP)

Concerns the use of "will-would" after "if." The article gathers together the many scattered individual contributions on the subject, thus enabling the teacher to form a judgment and at the same time providing him with solid support for making corrections. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

English has two classes of modal deference expressions that may be superordinate to performative verbs. Verbs representing the illocutionary force of a sentence are sometimes embedded in modal constructions whose function is auxiliary to the central illocutionary act. This phenomenon is discussed in this paper. (CK)

The effect of presuppositions on the applicability of grammatical rules is discussed. It is argued that the speaker's presupposition may cause a grammatical rule to become optional. (RM)

Although Mandarin is a discourse topic oriented language rather than a subject and sentence oriented one, Chinese children acquiring Mandarin attempt in their early speech to exactly mark the same referential grammatical relationships as subject, object, location, and instrument by using case or ergative markers. Only after marking a closed set of…

Following a discussion of the role of classifiers (i.e., verbs of motion and location) in American Sign Language, this manual presents a six-unit program designed to teach students to produce sentences with classifiers. First, an overview is provided of the hierarchy of verbs of motion and location produced when the resources of the body are…

Shows students how to write effective leads for news stories. (RB)