This article explores the influence of idiomatic syntactic constructions (i.e., constructions whose phrase structure rules violate the rules that underlie the construction of other kinds of sentences in the language) on the acquisition of phrase structure. In Experiment 1, participants were trained on an artificial language generated from…

This study examined the representation of knowledge in text writing in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults in the Netherlands. The research analyzed the use of clause linking devices to compose larger text units. Special attention was given to the use of causal relational markers and the extent to which causal relations within the texts matched…

If good proficiency in L2 entails the acquisition not only of many single words but of many lexical chunks as well, it must then be asked how all this additional lexis is to be committed to long-term memory in the limited time available on non-intensive classroom-based language courses. If it is the case that a significant fraction of…

This study investigated whether pre-task planning that embeds grammatical guidance to attend to a specific L2 form might be a suitable pedagogical choice in beginning-level foreign language classrooms. First-year high school students of English in Japan were asked to do an oral story-retelling task with a class partner under one of three…

One characteristic of causative verbs in French, Spanish, and Italian is that the subject of the embedded verb appears to the right of its object (if it has one). A second distinguishing property is the Case that appears on the subject embedded under the causative verb. It is always either accusative or dative, depending on the transitivity of the…

The author proposes an abstract form for the base categorial component of a transformational grammar--a form which represents categories and relations (functions) in a way that holds reasonable promise for resolving certain very broad problems of the interplay between linguistic form and function. The problems are so broad that almost everything…

This book is designed to make the thought of Noam Chomsky, a scholar whose work has been influential not only in the field of linguistics but in psychology, philosophy, and political science as well, accessible to a wider public than is reached by Chomsky's highly technical writing. The author expresses the hope that this book will provide the…

Chomsky has suggested that certain lexical items, which he calls "referential items," should be given integer markers (or "indices") and that the noun-phrase deletion transformation which creates reflexive pronouns should be limited to cases where the noun-phrase to be deleted is fully identical to the antecedent noun-phrase,…

Discusses the use of the most frequently used Spanish preposition, the "a." Examples of the various instances of use are given. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Three experiments evaluated modifications of conceptual knowledge associated with judgments of adjective-noun conceptual combinations. The subjects included 109 students at the University of Illinois (Champaign). Results indicate that models that attempt to explain combined categories by adding or changing a single feature are not successful. (TJH)

Linguistic expressions involving body parts (and other entities) belonging to an "interested person" often have unique grammatical properties, e.g., the dative case in Russian. The notion called Inalienable Possession (IP) is used to account for such properties. Semantic and pragmatic analyses account for some of the properties of IP in Russian.…

The predominant view of the binding facts of the Japanese reflexive "zibun" is that there are two types of uses; one is as a reflexive that is to be bound by the clause-mate subject, and the other is as the so-called "logophoric" pronoun. Accordingly, the binding theory of "zibun" along the lines of this view will…

Revised version of a paper presented at the Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, July 31, 1971. (RS)

Nomina actionis'' may be defined as a substantive derived from a verb and denoting action. (RS)

Indicates that the variables associated with age not only increase recall performance and chunking but they influence the manner in which semantic and syntactic information in sentences is processed as well. (Author/WY)