This article notes some problems arising from treating verb-final German word order as basic, as suggested by previous articles, and suggests that communicative competence and understanding of work-order principles would be better achieved with early introduction and drill in all three order types. (CHK)

The implications of the properties of certain recursive rules are explored. It is concluded that (a) no completely coherent system of rules could allow perniciously recursive rules, and (b) certain constructions of English can only be described using perniciously recursive rules. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

Underlying structures in English sentences containing the verbs "order" and "tell" are compared. (Available from Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland) (RM)

This article discusses Nass-Gitksan, a native language of northern British Columbia. The basic syntactic structures of the language are presented, along with arguments to show that Nass-Gitskan is an ergative language both at the deep and the surface syntactic levels. (CLK)

Boundaries in running speech are not all equally obvious acoustically. The research reported here is concerned with identifying the acoustic characteristics that trigger the listener's response to boundary signals. The eventual goal is to establish the relevance of the boundary to the syntactic and semantic structure of the message. (Author/TL)

This paper considers some aspects of sentence construction characteristic of the variety of English spoken at Isleta pueblo, an Indian community located fifteen miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. (CK)

This study of the speech of a five-year-old Japanese girl learning English focused on the use of prefabricated routines where items are memorized as wholes. The forms of the copula, "do you" questions and embedded "how to" questions were examined. (AG)

Explains techniques used in teaching the process of nominalization to foreign students at the Universite de Paris VIII, in reaction to common usage in the press. The techniques specifically do not use a generative grammar approach but apply principles of transformation for syntactical description. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

An analysis of one theory of the acquisition of head movement by children is presented, using longitudinal data from the Mayan language, K'iche'. This theory assumes that children would just require positive evidence of head movement in the input language to instantiate the constructions of their own grammar. The Incorporation Theory addresses the…

An alternative to the standard theory that language learners always formulate the simplest rule to accommodate data is proposed. This new position states that the system of formulating rules and the generalizations made from it by children and adults in the stages of language learning needs to be more specific. The present theory excludes the use…

Analysis of the factors that make a text coherent or non-coherent suggests that total coherence requires cohesion not only on the textual surface but on the semantic level as well. Syntactic evidence of non-coherence includes lack of formal agreement blocking a potential cross-reference, anaphoric and cataphoric references that do not follow their…

A study of Korean children's interpretation of the reflexive pronoun "caki" when it precedes a third person noun phrase, that is, in backward anaphora, had as subjects 4- to 11-year-old children living in Korea. Test sentences designed on the basis of two important syntactic aspects in Korean reflexive anaphora--relational hierarchy and…

A study of the cognitive processes involved in achieving coherence in discourse examined a major factor affecting the accessibility of referents: the length of absence of the referent from the distribution of different types of grammatical referential devices (definite nouns and anaphoric pronouns) in discourse. Six versions of a set of twenty…

The relationship of one aspect of conversational style, the degree of directness in the sending and interpretation of messages, to ethnicity was investigated in a comparison of the communication styles of Greeks and Americans. It was hypothesized that Greeks tend to be more indirect in speech than Americans, and that English speakers of Greek…

In order to account for the ways in which combined and decombined sentences work, and to determine why some texts are perceived as being well-written and others are perceived as poor and ineffective, 11 texts were selected for distribution to students for ranking, all on the same topic--the Civil War. Overall, students ranked Bruce Catton's "Grant…