The writing of ESL students, while sophisticated in some respects, often contains fragments and run-ons. Because these students have no reliable, self-monitoring system for analyzing their writing and because they believe they are communicating effectively, they fail to recognize their difficulties in forming complete sentences. This paper…

This paper discusses how an understanding of speech acts contributes to the communicative competence in foreign language learning. Reviewing John Searle's five categories of speech acts (1976), the directive is discussed in terms of its manifestations in various foreign languages. Examples of directives in English, German, French, and Spanish are…

This study examines the interaction between the deletion of the nominal plural marker and the verbal plural marker in Puerto Rican Spanish. It seeks to establish whether: (1) marker deletion in the noun phrase and marker deletion in the verb phrase specifically constrain each other, or (2) the system of local concord noted for the noun phrase…

Arguing that the vagueness with which the relationship between social interaction and language is often treated in the literature makes it difficult to explicate and evaluate different views of that relationship, this paper poses four questions designed to differentiate positions and to provide a system for organizing data potentially relevant to…

This paper challenges the characterization of bilingual behavior derived from the code-switching model, and especially the notion of linguistic independence on which psychological studies of bilingualism have focused almost exclusively. While linguists have concentrated on the situational determinants of code-switching, psychologists have focused…

A theory of style called the doctrine of synonymity argues that the separation of form from content allows the possibility of alternative phrasing. This theory led to the conception that during the writing process, writers consider different ways of phrasing and settle on the formulation that best expresses the meaning intended. However, the…

Changes in frequency of occurrence of the following linguistic variables in recovery from aphasia due to left temporal lobe lesions are analyzed in text and graphs: (1) quantity of verbalization, (2) syntactic structure: subject-verb-object vs. topic-comment, (3) syntactic complexity, (4) nouns and verbs, (5) morphology, (6) anaphora, and (7)…

This study focuses on the development of the ability to talk about events in time -- to specify occurrence in time with reference to the present as well as to locate events in time with reference to each other. The child's learning of how to mark the different kinds of relationships between two events is discussed. This study of current relevance…

The count/mass disinction is often considered to be a semantic one because it distinguishes those nouns that refer to countable things from those that refer to non-countable things. However, exceptions indicate that semantic properties alone are not sufficient to determine noun sub-categorization. Therefore, such sub-categorization must be defined…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

A research project is discussed involving the collection of production data from writing samples of 375 adult learners of English divided equally among five language backgrounds: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Spanish. Information is presented about three constructions: (1) subject relative clause, (2) infinitival complement on verb, and…

Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…