Syntax, or, loosely, sentence structure, is a major linguistic variable influencing the comprehensibility of every written sentence. This paper attempts to set forth the relationship between elements of syntax and reading comprehension as the classroom teacher might see them, and to propose a strategy, the Complete Linguistic Elements Paradigm…

This book is a transformational generative discussion of American English designed for use at the undergraduate as well as the graduate level. Chapter 1 deals with the definition of language and questions of dialect and standard language. Chapter 2, "The Nature of Linguistic Data," considers the speaker's knowledge of his language and the…

In 1602, Bernardo Jose de Aldrete wrote a book on Spanish linguistics entitled "Del origen de la lengua castellana o romance que hoy se usa en Espana" (The Origin of Castilian Presently Spoken in Spain") in which he explains and defends Castilian against the purist preference for Latin. This article reviews and evaluates Aldrete's linguistic ideas…

This book offers a theory of language which departs from both structuralist and Chomskyan transformational linguistics in using semantic structure as its base. The theory is illustrated mostly from English by means of a step-by-step analysis of a large part of English semantic structure. A specific and detailed theory of language is thus…

The purpose of this report is to describe a set of programs which either perform certain tasks useful in the generation of programed foreign-language instructional material or facilitate the writing of such task-oriented programs by other researchers. The programs described are these: (1) a PDP-10 assembly language program for the selection from a…

Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…

The objectives of this project were the instrumental analysis and detailed description of the phonetic features of American English and of the foreign languages most commonly taught in the United States--German, Spanish, and French. Eleven prosodic features, 13 vocalic features, and 16 consonant features of each are compared to English. A…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

The present volume (originally published in German under the title "Einfuhrung in Problematik und Methodik der Sprachwissenschaft" by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, in 1943) contains a "clear, elegant and non-technical introduction into some of the fundamental problems of general linguistics, enlivened by numerous examples, mainly from the Romance…

This paper deals with three problems encountered in the areal study of "colonial" and "immigrant" languages (used in Haugen's sense) and examines how data presented in tabular or map form can assist in their solution. They are: (1) the mechanisms by which the speakers of various dialects of a single language--dialects which…

This essay discusses a theory of grammar which incorporated Chomsky's distinction between deep and surface structure and accepts Fillmore's proposal to exclude such subject and concepts as direct object from the base structure. While recognizing the need for specifying an underlying set of caselike relations, it is proposed that this need can best…

Shilha, which is spoken in southwest Morocco, is one of the most widely distributed of the Berber languages. The dialect described in the work is found in the area extending from Agadir to Ifni and as far east as Taroudant. This study provides a general description of the structure of the language by examing the phonology, morphology, major form…

The justification for the Chomsky-Halle Auxiliary Reduction Rule III, called Pretonic Stress Placement (PSP), is questioned from the point of view of the native speaker. The similarity of the PSP and the Main Stress Rule (MSR) is examined through the application of these rules to polysyllabic monomorphemic and polymorphemic words. This analysis is…

As an alternative to the conflict among college composition teachers who are either repressive and authoritarian or permissive and lenient, a middle course offers teachers the latitude of encouraging free writing for some students and directed writing for other students, both of which may be responses to students' needs to express themselves. This…