The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

Gestures of six young adults were transcribed from videotaped narrations. Iconic, or imitative, gestures were found to have a tendency to depict whole scenes, and to correlate positively with motions implied in accompanying verbs. Gestures were found to be marked for such contrasting grammatical features as agent and patient, and transitive and…

The ability of children to process words printed in a second language was studied over the course of a school year as the children acquired increasing familiarity with the language. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, represented four ability groups with respect to their reading skills in their first and second languages. A…

Fifteen English-speaking and fifteen French-speaking preschool children were each videotaped during two play sessions, one with a native and one with a non-native peer. Length of verbal utterances toward the non-native listener was significantly lower than toward the native listener, supporting the notion that native speakers adapt the amount of…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

It is contended that there are such things as discourse blocs, and that they are composed of discourse units glued together into a contextuated whole by bloc signals. There are three kinds of structures with which it is necessary to deal in order to discuss coherent discourse: the discourse bloc, the discourse unit, and the bloc signal.…

An exploratory study investigated the communicative behaviors that differentiate talkative from reticent children. Four three-year-old girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in naturalistic interactions with six to eight previously unfamiliar adults. All four children had demonstrated age-appropriate knowledge of linguistic…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

The study of schema theory as part of the inquiry into the nature of language comprehension has drawn attention to the reader's central role in the construction of text-guided meaning. Contemporary schema theory represnts a major step in the effort to move away from a reductionist view of reading comprehension. Specifically, it focuses on wbat…

THE DIALECT UPON WHICH THIS CHRESTOMATHY IS BASED IS THE NORTHERN (SOSVA) DIALECT, SPOKEN BY THE MAJORITY OF THE VOGUL PEOPLE IN THE NORTHWESTERN PART OF SIBERIA. THE TEXTS, WHICH FURNISH A BASIS FOR THE GRAMMAR AND SOUND SYSTEM OF THIS BOOK, ARE TAKEN FROM TRANSCRIPTIONS OF MATERIAL RECORDED BY THE AUTHOR IN 1957-58. A DESCRIPTION OF THE VOWELS,…

WRITTEN COMPOSITIONS WERE OBTAINED FROM 48 CHILDREN, FOUR FROM EACH AGE GROUP FROM EIGHT THROUGH 11, ASSIGNED TO THREE IQ GROUPS--RETARDED, NORMAL, AND SUPERIOR. USING SEVERAL OF THE FLESCH CRITERIA (WHICH USE NUMBER OF SYLLABLES, AVERAGE SENTENCE LENGTH, AND NUMBER OF DEFINITE WORDS AS INDICES), COMPOSITIONS WERE SCORED FOR DEFINITENESS OF STYLE.…

THIS STUDY WAS DESIGNED TO TEST THE HYPOTHESIS THAT ASSOCIATIVELY RELATED NOUNS EMBEDDED IN CONNECTED DISCOURSE--AT LEAST IN THE CASE OF ITEMS THAT APPEAR IN THE SAME OR IN CONTIGUOUS SENTENCES--ARE STORED MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN ASSOCIATIVELY UNRELATED NOUNS. A 2X2 FACTORIAL DESIGN WAS EMPLOYED (WITH 20 SS IN EACH GROUP) IN WHICH SS WERE ASKED TO…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO DISCUSS THE POSSIBILITY THAT SOME LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS ARE, IN FACT, THE INEVITABLE RESULT OF UNIVERSAL MENTAL CAPACITIES. ONE SUCH UNIVERSAL IS SUGGESTED, AND THE ENTIRE QUESTION IS CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF CERTAIN THEORIES OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT--MAINLY PIAGET'S, AND SECONDARILY BRUNER'S AND VYGOTSKY'S.…

THIS STUDY OF THE CANTONESE PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM IS A CASE STUDY OF THE PHONOLOGICAL COMPONENT OF A GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. ATTEMPTS ARE MADE IN CHAPTER III TO SOLVE SOME OLD PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE ANALYSIS OF CANTONESE WITHIN THIS NEW THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. MOST OF THE PROBLEMS ARE PSEUDO-PROBLEMS, IN THE SENSE THAT THEY POSE DIFFICULTIES ONLY…

RHYTHM IS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF THE PROSODIC LEVEL OF SPEECH. THE BASIC UNITS OF RHYTHM, UPON WHICH ARE CARRIED MANY OTHER PROSODIC UNITS, ARE POINTS OR INTERVALS OF TIME. THE TIME INTERVALS BETWEEN SUCCESSIVE MAJOR STRESSES ARE HYPOTHESIZED TO REMAIN ROUGHLY EQUAL IN ENGLISH SPEECH, I.E., ENGLISH IS SAID TO BE A STRESS-TIMED LANGUAGE. IN ORDER…