A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their…

Advancement of students' abilities to cope with the demands of exposition and argument is noted when they are encouraged to accept mixed diction within a framework of activities that interrelate thinking, speaking, reading, writing, and listening, in the context of the immediate audience of class and teacher. Research indicates that when a weak…

A study examined how Japanese language use reflects the hierarchical and compartmentalized society and the psychological attitudes of the speaker through analysis of the verb forms used. Data were drawn from a survey of 500 individuals concerning the choice of verb form in different social situations, and from transcriptions of a housewife's…

Issues in syntactic processing, that aspect of the human sentence comprehension mechanism that recovers a syntactic structure for a given word string, are discussed. In particular, two structural ambiguities in Mandarin Chinese are examined and their successful parsing within the framework of minimal parsing models is discussed. Recent work…

In comparing 50 English as a second language (ESL) compositions written in class to 50 ESL compositions written at home, accuracy on the syntactic level and fluency on the discourse or rhetorical level for the home and class conditions were examined. The subjects, twenty-five undergraduate foreign students enrolled in special sections of freshman…

Superordinates in Halliday and Hasan's analysis of cohesion are lexical items which refer to preceding terms, ideas, or actions, or to whole stretches of discourse, by naming a more inclusive category or class within which the antecedent is included. In written texts the interrelationships between superordinates and more specific terms, or…

A statistical analysis was made of the most productive term-formation processes in English, German, French, and Russian in the field of chemistry. The study deals with (1) the morphological aspect of term-formation, that is, the most productive affixes involved in term-formation in the four languages; and (2) the syntactical aspect, that is, the…

Studies of age differences in second language learning ability are collected along with commentary on the results. The 12 papers describe long and short term studies of children and adults that focus on the optimal age for second language acquisition, the effect of different teaching methods and environments on age differences, and theories that…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

The third of three studies involving a comparative analysis of transactional and narrative writing of selected samples of students in two Ontario districts, this study addressed questions arising from the earlier studies and examined the writing skills of students in grades 5, 8, and 12. Writing samples were examined for conformity to the norms of…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

R-QUAF (Rapid Question and Answer Formation) is a device which enables the English as a second language (ESL) class to systematically review previously studied sentence patterns in a brisk and lively way. The technique revolves around a wall chart with cue words for questions running down the left-hand side (to elicit the various structures to be…

This guide is designed for classroom teachers who work with non English dominant Asian students from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Historic information, English as a Second Language contrasts, and cultural information are included. The three basic components of the guide are the phonological, the syntactical, and the cultural.…

The process of learning Russian should be no more difficult than the process of learning other languages although it may take somewhat longer. The phonetic system should not present major difficulties with respect to individual sounds, but intonation may be difficult because Russian pitch patterns represent different intentions and emotions than…

A study examined student writing from the point of view of each of three language functions: the expressive function (the evidence of the individual writer), the appeal function (evidence of a particular listener or audience), and the representative function (attention to the topic). While speaking, students have a clear sense of the three…