Provides a history of the development of the theory of the "circumstantial" in grammar, presents its chief concepts, and discusses its implications for a theory of semantics. (AM)

Traces the development of French "grammatical analysis" and "logical analysis," from the 16th century concept of syntax, to 19th century pedagogy. (AM)

Examines the traditionally prestigious status of the sentence in grammatical analysis, and traces the history of the word "phrase" as a part of French grammatical language. (AM)

Analyzes sentences by remedial college students which contain typical errors. (DD)

Using a particular sentence type--an exclamative construction referred to as "Nominal Extraposition" (NE)--this article outlines a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The article suggests that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an…

Compares and contrasts the progressive constructions in English and Japanese, concluding that whereas an English sentence of this type refers to a dynamic state, this need not be the case in Japanese. The article argues that the progressive operators in both English (be-ing) and Japanese (-teiru) can be characterized as stativizer. (18 references)…

Presents a developmental perspective on text construction, understood as managing information within and across sentence boundaries. Claims that the systematicity in non-standard constructions in basic writer's texts reflects student awareness of three obligatory areas of information management in texts: topic management, reference tracking, and…

The author reacts to a critique of an earlier article he wrote on invented sentences in students learning English. (VWL)

Describes a classroom grammatical activity in which the teacher isolates typical sentences from textbooks and writes the individual words on placards. Describes how students are each given a placard and asked to form a sentence. Reports that students enjoyed this activity and began to get the feel of language and sentence structure. (RS)

Discusses functional and anaphoric control in complex sentences (sentences with more than one verb) in Jordanian Arabic within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. It is argued that Jordanian Arabic utilizes anaphoric rather that functional control. (18 references) (JL)

Presents head-movement account for long-distance (L-D) reflexivization effects in adult Russian. Two experiments with a total of 65 Russian-speaking children (aged 4;0 to 9;0) show that Russian children accept L-D readings out of subjunctive clauses introduced by the complementizer "chtoby" where such readings are out for adults, though…

Argues that Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages exhibit properties that are consistent with the typology of Lehmann and Venneman in which the basic dichotomy is between Object-Verb and Verb-Object languages and that there is no reason to believe that there are fewer exceptionless generalizations to be made about SVO languages than there are about…

Presents a preliminary study of the use of the Spanish preposition "a" with inanimate direct object nouns (DOs). The properties of such constructions at the lexical, sentence, and discourse levels are described, and the general principles that condition the preposition's appearance are discussed. (21 references) (GLR)

Thirteen papers in this book illustrate MacWhinney and Bates's Competition Model (CM), with a focus on cross-linguistic processing. Studies in this volume show that (1) the CM is useful in predicting certain gross cross-linguistic differences of comprehension, particularly in relation to actor assignment and (2) children's processing strategies…

Two studies are discussed that were conducted to investigate the status of control principles in children's grammar. An attempt is made to characterize the children's grammar types in terms of Universal Grammar and to account for how the grammar types change. (35 references) (JL)