Examines the story recall of normal and dyslexic readers in relation to story grammar categories and suggests that dyslexic students do not have significant deficiencies in use of such categories. Discusses the results in light of the need for considering multiple processing levels and as indicating that story grammars may be of limited diagnostic…

Goodluck and Solan (EJ 205 641) presented alternative formulations about why errors predicted by basic operations fail to occur and suggested a refined hypothesis. Each aspect of their argument is addressed, and it is concluded that descriptive power, methodology and principles for restricting error predictions favor our original analysis. (RD)

Surface structure morphology in child second language acquisition is investigated with emphasis on mastery of correct forms and consequent implications for teachers and researchers. Communication strategies used by the second language learner are discussed. (RM)

Translations of three Arabic texts into English illustrate the differences between the aural and visual modes of text development. An analysis of the function of these modes in their social contexts explains the problems of the negative transfer of habits from one language to another. (Author/CB)

An overview of contemporary Hispanic dialectology, focusing on phonological phenomena, syntax, classification schemes, and bilingual communities, demonstrates that dialectology has long ceased to be the collection of innumerable surface deviations. It is suggested that dialectology is a theoretical discipline searching for universal principles to…

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…

This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different…

Discusses the usefulness of earlier, neglected linguistic traditions in solving some of the problems faced by transformationalists today. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Inversion constructions (declarative sentence constructions in which the subject follows part or all of its verb phrase) are distributed over the whole range of spoken and written language, not along the spoken-written dimension but along a colloquial-literary dimension. Some of these inversions are colloquial or literary for functional reasons,…

A taxonomy of revision changes was developed and applied to 18 case studies of writers' revisions. Subjects were six inexperienced student-writers, six advanced student-writers, and six expert adult-writers. The primary distinction of the taxonomy was between surface (formal and meaning-preserving) revisions and text-base (microstructure and…

THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE IS CONSIDERED AS A QUESTION OF SPECIFYING HOW CHILDREN'S CAPACITY FOR LANGUAGE INTERACTS WITH THEIR LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE--THE INTERACTION TAKING THE FORM OF RELATING THE UNIVERSAL ASPECTS OF THE DEEP STRUCTURE TO THE IDIOSYNCRATIC ASPECTS OF THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. THIS INTERACTION OCCURS IN THE ACQUISITION…

English teachers have a responsibility to interpret for students the current linguistic insights into language and to lead them in an open-minded inquiry involving (1) careful observation of language data, (2) translation of this observation into rule-like descriptions, and (3) verification of the rules to determine if revisions must be made. In…

Discursive functions are seldom expressed in an absolutely neutral way. In most cases, various colorings - expressive, affective or social - are superimposed on the utterance by which a function is conveyed. In so far as these colorings are not random shades, but can be regarded as graded nuances within given ranges, selected in order to fit the…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

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…