Focuses upon the importance of understanding the consequences of the "myth, masking, and mode" in guiding the language development of black disadvantaged children; based upon a paper presented before the Niagara Linguistic Frontier. (RD)

Presents an essentially Bloomfieldian approach to language and language teaching; sees the concept of language as interplay between stimuli and reactions as the basis of a wholly creditable system of teaching, a tremendous number of textbooks, and a large number of language courses." (FB)

To master the subtleties of Chinese takes years, but most Americans can learn some basic spoken and written Chinese in a matter of weeks or months. A new phonic system, Pin Yin Romanizing System, tones, structure, and characters, and a comparison of Japanese and Chinese are discussed. (MLW)

This paper discusses how two contrasting models of language relate respectively to a structural and a functional view of language teaching. The implications for syllabus design are considered when the emphasis shifts from the formal aspects of language structure to a consideration of how language functions in the social context. (CFM)

Linguists have classified analysis of the "ba" construction into three approaches: structural, semantic and communicative. This paper outlines treatment of "ba" in several major Chinese textbooks and suggests an approach to teaching the construction. Students must be taught linguistic information in logical steps for best command of the language.…

Identifies issues specific to syntactic parsing for intelligent computer-assisted language instruction (ICALI), including applications, types of input errors, characteristics of natural language, and output. Presents a general overview and assessment of grammar formalisms and parsing strategies in relation to ICALI. (Author/LS)

Examines the limits of Julia Kristeva's approach to modernist language. The article argues that Kristeva draws on a structuralist model of language and the unconscious, utilizing a code and deviation framework, thereby restricting her ability to elucidate explicit effects of modernist dislocation of language. The article also probes the problems…

The quantitative methodology of GOLDVARB is used to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and Spanish. The distribution is shown to conform to a grammatically and pragmatically motivated pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure. (Contains 26 references.)…

Lidz, Waxman, and Freedman [Lidz, J., Waxman, S., & Freedman, J. (2003). What infants know about syntax but couldn't have learned: Evidence for syntactic structure at 18-months. "Cognition," 89, B65-B73.] argue that acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric one in English relies on innate knowledge within the learner.…

Reconsiders development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. Suggests that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content, then, over time decays into a simple concord shell. Upon…

Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

Theoretical and empirical research on argument and argumentation in science education has intensified over the last two decades. The term argument in this review refers to the artifacts that a student or a group of students create when asked to articulate and justify claims or explanations whereas the term argumentation refers to the process of…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…