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)

Reviews and compares views of grammarians, usage experts, and authors of technical writing books concerning "dangling participles." Finds many unattached clauses are unacceptable, some are less objectionable, and still others are acceptable. Notes that cultural (and perhaps gender) differences between humanistic teachers and…

Investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-a-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). Subjects were first and second language speakers of Chinese and English. Results show that both Chinese and English controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues…

Maintains that Edwin Williams has not properly appreciated or presented the central theses of "Indices and Identity" (I&I). The article also states that criticisms of particular analyses offered are consistently off the mark. This discussion note is presented as a clarification of the issues presented. The central concern in I&I is with the nature…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Argues that intonation is best analyzed as an overt marking of the focus structure of a sentence. The linguistic level of f-structure in which both topic and focus are identified provides the link between context, interpretation, syntax, and intonation. (Author/VWL)

The present study investigates the production of regular and irregular verbs in the past tense and the comprehension of passive sentences by Greek-speaking PD patients, and compares their behavior to that of normal speakers. Although the two groups manifest large scale differences at all the above constructions, the behavior of PDs is not…