Details a study designed to determine whether different titles caused different structures to be set up for the same text material. (FL)

Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

Reviews studies that have investigated the relationship between reading comprehension and the frequency of occurrence of syntactic structures in children's oral language. Shows that children have difficulty comprehending written materials that contain unfamiliar syntactic structures. Discusses the instructional implications of the findings.…

Divides Taiwanese modals into: (1) authority, where a deep structure agent exercises authority; (2) contigency, which concerns the speaker's judgment of the possibility or logical necessity df the occurrence of an event; and (3) volition, which expresses the subject's desires. The constructions in which these modals appear are examined. (PJM)

Discusses the paradigms in American Sign Language (ASL) resulting from a process called "numeral incorporation" and others in which numeral handshapes alternate to express different numerical values. Concludes that not only are the signs in the "decade" paradigm fixed units in ASL grammar, but so are all the other examples of numeral…

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

Examines sensitivity to the phonological and orthographic composition of multisyllabic words and nonwords amongst a group of English-speaking 11-year-olds. Finds that nonword but not word reading is affected by syllable length, and nonwords are assigned stress patterns which appear to be related to the lexical syllables that were used to construct…

Investigates how semantic properties of functional categories are acquired by second language (L2) learners in an instructional setting. Findings suggest that L2 learners are able to acquire interpretable formal features not transferable from their native language. (Author/VWL)

Examines imperatives regarding their different construction forms as well as the syntactic and pragmatic features of the imperative stem that influence the form and meaning of the tag attached to it. The conclusion is drawn that the imperative tag cannot be best analyzed as merely a frozen expression. (GLR)

Proposes an analysis of Spanish Neg-transportation that is not restricted to any particular set of verbs and can in fact be applied to wherever its structural description is met. The proposed method also explains why the complement of some negated matrix verbs can be expressed in either the indicative or the subjunctive. (CB)

Examines the notion of "head" in syntax and the extent to which it extends to morphology in English, and discusses the notion of headedness and percolation. The argument is made that percolation in English does not work, casting doubt on the notion of head in morphology. (34 references) (GLR)

Explores research and theory regarding the relation between second-language acquisition and language universals research with respect to three phenomena: extraction; structure dependence; and the distribution of overt reflexives. (Author/CB)

Considers how some of the central features of Welsh can be accommodated within the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). HPSG is a framework developed over the last few years that seeks to combine the insights of generalized phrase structure, grammar, categorical grammar, and other theories. (22 references) (Author/VWL)

In the first of six articles about the links between cultural and linguistic traits, the ways in which French linguistic structures and imagination create a culture are explored. (MSE)

Describes the results of an analysis of 87 non-formulaic abstracts for structures of semantic dependency between sentences. An automatic structural simplification is presented which is based on an assumption about the use of the dependency structure, and the results of an evaluation of the method are discussed. (25 references) (CLB)