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)

Percentages of unexpected pronominal usage in Japanese are listed. Data was gathered from Japanese magazine articles concerning individuals. Tendencies rather than strict rules became evident. (SC)

Transformational analysis of three model bisegmental sentences reveals the possibility of a more practical classification of pronominal words; this is seen as a useful portion of a still-to-be-written context grammar. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A COMPANION TO THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF THE STUDY OF HAUSA SYNTAX, THIS THIRD PART USES NINETEEN SPECIFIC TEXTS TO ACQUAINT THE READER WITH THREE TYPES OF WRITTEN HAUSA--PRINTED NARRATIVE, EXTEMPORE NARRATIVE, AND NEWSPAPER TEXTS. (THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES DEAL WITH STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION WORDS, RESPECTIVELY.) THE ENTIRE CORPUS IS APPROXIMATELY…

THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN READER EFFICIENCY IN PROCESSING SENTENCES AND DIFFERENCES IN THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THE STIMULUS SENTENCES WERE STUDIED. THE EFFICIENCY OF PROCESSING, AS MEASURED BY THE SUBJECTS' EYE-VOICE SPAN, VARIED WITH CHANGES IN THE DEEP STRUCTURE. COMPARISONS WERE MADE BETWEEN READER PROCESSING OF PAIRS OF SENTENCES IN WHICH THE…

Ninety-six subjects were assigned randomly to eight groups of 12 subjects. The independent variables were (1) controlled association strength between groups of words within a string (high association [HA] versus low association [LA]), (2) syntactic structure (grammatical [G] versus ungrammatical [U] strings), and (3) instructions (ordered learning…

One of the ways to handle the increasing demands on readers' skills is to make writing more readable. The problem has two different aspects: predicting how readable writing will be to a reader, and producing writing that is readable to that reader. Prediction is relatively simple, and can be done statistically with readability formulas. Production…