RESULTS OF AN EARLIER STUDY SUGGEST THAT SENTENCES BEGINNING WITH NOUNS OF HIGH RESPONSE STRENGTH ARE EASIER TO LEARN THAN SENTENCES ENDING WITH NOUNS OF HIGH RESPONSE STRENGTH. THE INFERENCE DERIVED FROM THAT STUDY, AND TESTED IN THE PRESENT STUDY, WAS THAT THE ORDER OF A WORD IN NATURAL SPEECH IS A FUNCTION OF RESPONSE STRENGTH, SO THAT WORDS…

The rules usually taught for german word order and order of sentence elements are seen as inaccurate. A numerical system is proposed which takes from the Duden grammar the three-field system, using the predicate segments as an orientation point. (IFS/WGA)

Proposes description of Latin syntactic structures through an analysis of their communicative functions. (AM)

Compares sentence interpretation in American and Italian children between the ages of two and five. Results indicated that Italian children relied primarily on semantic cues, whereas American children relied on word order. (Author/CI)

Discusses factors governing the choice between natural and inverted word order in subject headings containing adjectival phrases. (FM)

Examines effect of training 70 preschool children with animate agent + animate patient sentences (AAV) or animate agent + inanimate patient sentences (IAV). Children were tested with noun-noun-verb (NNV) order sentence to assess whether AAV or IAV produced better comprehension. AAV and IAV showed comparable results at age three, IAV resulted in…

Discussed the relationship between definiteness and word order (WO) from three aspects: the position of the unquantified noun phrases as related to their definiteness; effects of quantifiers on WO; and relative order of different noun phrases in the same clause. Data verify that the correlation between definiteness and WO is valid for larger…

Presents data from a study that was designed to find pragmatic motivation of word order variation in main and independent clauses containing only three constituents: a one-valency verb, a lexical subject noun phrase, and a prepositional phrase. (15 references) (GLR)

Discusses first- and second-language word order acquisition. A version of the OV/VO parameter is developed that is not construction specific. It relates various empirical domains, including basic word order, scrambling, exceptional case marking, and the distribution of particles. (Author/JL)

This experimental study on the acquisition of the double-object construction in Spanish as a second language (L2) by a group of first language (L1) English adults investigates the role of Universal Grammar (UG) and its interaction with L1 in two modules of grammar: morphosyntax and semantics. The double-object construction in Spanish differs from…

A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given…

Recent proposals concerning the relationship between thematic structure and syntactic structure, including the idea of thematic hierarchy, when used with certain language-specific properties, offer insight into some problems concerning the Mandarin Chinese phrase structure condition (PSC). The PSC is such that the internal structure of XP contains…

Drills in German word order were developed by use of random generation of sentences coupled with the Ohio State edit function. Differences between English and German word orders are a cause of interference in the learning of German structural patterns. German word order may be manipulated in some situations and must be in others. Although the…

Children ranging in age from three to seven years acted out the meaning of reversible active, cleft, passive, and inverted cleft sentences. (JMB)

The dislocation of sentence elements in spoken French is seen as allowing the speaker to free himself from certain constraints imposed on word order, position of accents, and grammar. Dislocation is described, its various functions are enumerated, and implications for second language instruction are outlined. (MSE)