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…

Designed to test the effect upon comprehension of repatterning passages from a tenth grade social studies text by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects expected to read the text, this instrument was applied to 34 subjects who were asked to write 1,000 words of prose…

This work asserts that contrastive analysis should be regarded as a technique of research and not limited to error prediction and material preparation. Introductory observations are made on the state of the field, the domain of contrastive analysis, contrastive analysis and transfer, and contrastive analysis and foreign language instruction. In…

This dictionary, containing 32,000 entries, has been compiled for the general use of the American student of Spanish and the Spanish-speaking student of English, with special reference in either case to New World usage as found in the United States and in Spanish America. Entries were selected according to the relative frequency of their…

To determine the effects of two facets of the adult's input in a child's acquisition of syntactic structures and vocabulary, fifteen classrooms of kindergarten, first, and second grade children from four middle socioeconomic class schools were assigned to either a literature group (which provided exposure to reading rich in varied syntactic…

Reading is a process in which written language conveys meaning between writer and reader. The reader uses graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues to get to the meaning. This study examines the reading process of 94 subjects with proficiency levels ranging from low second grade to high tenth grade using the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues. The…

The effects of three types of pretraining in the use of syntactical verbal mediators on subsequent paired-associate performance were investigated. Subjects were 40 Negro and 40 white first graders randomly assigned to one of four groups. Condition 1 consisted of pretraining in both "mediation" instruction (experimenter gave subjects a sentence…