Summarizes the results of attempts to teach a young chimpanzee to use sign language, and raises questions about the uniqueness of human language. Analyzes language development in children and suggests that humans differ from nonhuman primates in the ability to analyze the environment into parts which can be manipulated in the mind, and that it is…

The underlying thesis of this article is that Nonstandard Negro English differs in its deep structure from Standard English. (Author/FWB)

Calls for a functional, semantically-based grammar for teachers, but not for pupils, to replace the traditional formal grammar they currently rely on. (JL)

A sampling methodology is proposed for determining lengths of tests designed to assess the comprehension of written discourse. It is based on Bormuth's transformational analysis, within a domain-referenced framework. Guidelines are provided for computing sample size and selecting sentences to which the transformational rules can be applied.…

Describes a study which found that generative rhetoric instruction produced a quantitative and qualitative increase in college students' syntactic maturity. (DD)

The nature of the system of linguistic entities of a natural language is examined. The purpose is to define the relation between "le lexique" and an overall linguistic theory, the relation between form and meaning. (Text is in French.) (TL)

For the past 30 years, much has been written about the works of Noam Chomsky. A comparison is presented of the latest writings about Chomsky (in particular P.M.S. Hacker's 1990 work) with those written in the early 1960s. (CFM)

Summarizes trends over the last century of analyzing literature (poetry and prose) through the aid of linguistic theory. The contributions and shortcomings of various schools (Structuralist, Danish, Formalist, Transformationalist, Generativist) to the evaluation of literature are briefly outlined. (LET)

Gives sample sentences showing the connection between grammatical and lexical semantic relationships, which present a complicated set of directions and rules for the learner. Methods are suggested for differentiating by category the meanings of ambiguous words. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

This paper argues against three premises of language innatism: 1) language is oral; 2) language is species-specific; and 3) man has a built-in language-specific capacity. (CHK)

The necessity is asserted for constructing a theory of contrastive analysis which would incorporate both translation equivalence and "form and placement of the rules in grammar" as criteria for making decisions concerning comparability. (Available from: See FL 508 214). (Author/RM)