A short study of definitions of the passive voice in French. Definitions are based on meaning; morphology; syntax; meaning and morphology; and morphology and syntax. The latter is the most widely accepted today. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A chronological bibliography of 14 citations dealing with the problem of script. (MM)

Modified version of a talk given at Bloomington, Indiana on March 29, 1971. (VM)

Explores markedness of languages and language change in relation to their roles in the consistency of language. Concludes typology provides no explanations in itself, but rather through data which need explanations and form a testing ground for linguistic theories. (Author/BK)

This paper presents evidence that English may be a completely caseless language, like Chinese, contrary to the widely held view that distinct pronoun forms and the genitive "'s" involve morphological case. It argues that "I" and "me" are both personal pronouns whereas "my,""mine," and "'s" are possessive pronouns. Contains 31 references. (MDM)

This article considers effects of construction frequency, form, function, and prototypicality on second language acquisition (SLA). It investigates these relationships by focusing on naturalistic SLA in the European Science Foundation corpus (Perdue, 1993) of the English verb-argument constructions (VACs): verb locative (VL), verb object locative…

Constructionist approaches to language hypothesize that grammar can be learned from the input using domain-general mechanisms. This emphasis has engendered a great deal of research--exemplified in the present issue--that seeks to illuminate the ways in which input-related factors can both drive and constrain constructional acquisition. In this…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

Offers a method for using structural analysis of literature, specifically, students discussed both structure and content within the context of four short stories, thus enriching their understanding of each by way of contrast. (SRT)

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as "put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel." Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase "the pan" will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based…

Most models of spoken production predict that shorter utterances should be initiated faster than longer ones. However, whether word-length effects in single word production exist is at present controversial. A series of experiments did not find evidence for such an effect. First, an experimental manipulation of word length in picture naming showed…

Two experiments investigated how children (aged 6-8) acquire knowledge of the direct and the indirect object in terms of linguistic marking. The experiments were designed to test the proposition that children should expect a marked linguistic form to be the indirect object. (GO)

Discusses the fact that the basic tendency of structural grammar theory has been to emphasize the principle of formality of description, rather than formality of content. (CK)

This article discusses the relationship between linguistic theory and structuralist philosophy, and explores the possibility of applying structuralist ideas to other human sciences such as anthropology. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Discusses Chomsky's influence in the field of linguistics and concludes that it is part of the branch of psychology and, hence, objective in its analysis of language behavior. (SB)