Comprehension of relative clauses was assessed in 10 Hebrew-speaking school-age children with syntactic SLI and in two groups of younger children with normal language development. Comprehension of subject- and object-relatives was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The findings were that while Hebrew-speaking children with…

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are…

This study investigated whether giving learners an opportunity for oral output has any positive effect on the L2 learners' acquisition of a grammatical form. Twenty-four adult ESL learners were randomly assigned to one of three groups: an output group, which engaged in a picture description task that involved input comprehension and output…

Comparison of Vietnamese-Australians' perception and production of the English compound-phrasal contrast with that of native English-speaking Australians indicated that the number of syllables and consonant clusters alien to Vietnamese phonology and length of residence in Australia were major factors affecting the Vietnamese-Australians'…

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes,…

this study, an analysis of poetry in Tina Sambal, a Philippine language spoken by about 70,000 persons in northern Zambales province, looks at the characteristics of the different poetic genres and poetic conventions followed in writing songs and poems. Primary emphasis is on phonological restrictions, grammatical liberties, and semantic…

This is the second volume of articles produced at the 1982 Summer Institute of Linguistics of the Linguistics Society of the Philippines. Seven articles from this conference appear in Volume 5, Number 1, grouped under Sections I and II. The remaining four papers, grouped under Section III, appear in this volume and deal with a variety of topics…

The typology of VSO (verb-subject-object) languages cannot be explained in terms of the syntactic theory (Government and Binding theory) that governs the more common SVO languages. It is considered that VSO languages might be derived from underlying SVO structure. This idea, known as the SVO Hypothesis, is presented as a paradigm to which examples…

A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their…

The goal of these two seventh-grade language units is to provide some basic understanding about the structure and complexity of the English language and about the human ability to handle that language in ordinary speech situations. The first unit inductively presents a set of ordered rules which follow the conventions of modern symbolic logic and…

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

The paper constitutes an attempt to provide a nonenumerative characterization of agreeing terms and agreement features. The following pertinent statements turn out to be (near) exceptionless: only coreferential terms agree, and for any given language all agreement features are pronominal ones. Four agreement features, gender, number, definiteness,…

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…

Examines some aspects of syntactic and semantic variation in the Arizona Tewa speech community, including the speech community members' perception of variation, with a view to exploring the implications of this variation for the study of language change and the anthropological study of language structure. (AM)

Responds to criticism of an earlier (1984) paper in which it was argued that the complements of Welsh control and raising verbs should be analyzed as verb phrases (VPs) and not as clauses with empty subjects. The l984 position is defended against the traditional analysis in the three critiqued areas.