This paper provides an analysis of the manual and non-manual pronouns identified in Mexican Sign Language (MSL) used by a female speaker in 1993, discusses syntactic uses of each type, and examines pronoun deletion. MSL has two distinct modes of expressing pronominal relationships: manual pronouns (including indexical, incorporated, classifiers,…

Many of the Zapotecan (Mexico) languages have a unique way of signaling co-reference between the subject and the possessor of the object: the subject is null. Analysis of such a construction is problematic to current theories of anaphoric construction. In this analysis, the construction is described and the theoretical problem is underlined by…

Two non-syntactic phenomena of Japanese reflexive binding by "zibun" ("self") are analyzed with respect to a pragmatic use condition on "zibun," a culture-specific condition, and the Maxim of Politeness (Fukada 1986). The first phenomenon is the tendency by native speakers of Japanese to avoid referring to an honored…

This paper is essentially a commentary on Steriade 1990, which deals with certain aspects of Winnebago phonology. The issues cluster around a much-discussed process known as Dorsey's Law (see Miner 1992 and references given there) that is operative in Mississippi Valley Siouan and that Steriade has generalized to other language groups. Winnebago…

Most studies that have been conducted on locative constructions in many languages show the relationship between the figure and the ground in terms of geometrical or topological terms. This report shows that in Sinhala the locative expressions answer not only the question "Where is the object X," but also indicate how the figure is oriented in…

Although conversational stories within one individual's corpus share the same structure, they have features that set them apart from one another. Based on the stories' general characteristics and the way they function in ongoing talk, they can be identified as: (1) durable personal experience narratives (PENs), which are often repeated during the…

To determine the usefulness in correctly pronouncing the vowels of three-syllable words of two commonly taught phonics rules and to assess whether their utility is inversely proportional to the number of syllables in a word, a study analyzed all of the over 100,000 three-syllable words in the "Scott Foresman Advanced Dictionary." As a reference,…

Examination of a small segment of French morphology involving the role of the final consonant illustrates the applicability of the natural morphology approach to linguistic analysis. Representative examples of modern French adjectival, verbal, and nominal word forms are subjected to analysis in terms of iconic, non-iconic, and counter-iconic…

A study of consonant-vowel linkages focused on the nature of the vowel boundaries with onset and codas. Subjects judged the status of various word pairs as possible exemplars of a particular manipulation they had been taught to listen for in model nonsense words. The models were of three distinct tasks: (1) a nucleus substitution task, to replace…

The differences between story grammar and story schema are outlined and discussed based on research on story understanding by children and adults. The contention of all story grammars is that stories have a relatively invariant structure despite great differences in story content. The importance of structure within folk tales, and the ways in…

An analysis of English sentences containing noun phrases (NPs) with extraposed complements argues that the extraposition (EX) is base-generated and not derived by any applications of the Move-alpha principle. A Move-alpha analysis is subject to substantial technical difficulties, and there exist cases of EX for which there is no plausible source…

In contrast to research and application of word frequency counts, there has been little or no use of syllable frequency counts. The few syllable counts that have been conducted are not well known, not often used, and not easily obtained. This is unfortunate, because a publicized, easily obtainable, computer syllable analysis would have numerous…

Presuppositions, those propositions which the sentence is not primarily about but which have to be established prior to the utterance of a sentence in order for communication to go smoothly, are discussed. The notions of the Kiparskys (1970), Lakoff (1970, 1971), Fillmore (1971), Karttunen (1971), and Horn (1969) are summarized with examples in an…

A CLASS OF TRANSFORMATION GRAMMARS IS DEFINED AND A COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR SENTENCE ANALYSIS IS DESCRIBED AND DOCUMENTED WITH RESPECT TO THIS CLASS. THE PROGRAM EXISTS IN PURE LISP FORM AND IN MIXED LISP AND IBM 7090 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE FORM. THE PAPER CONTAINS INFORMATION TO PERMIT THE USER TO WRITE HIS OWN TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. COMPUTER PROGRAM…

This book is intended as a reference grammar for English-speaking students of present-day Albanian. The introductory chapter provides information on the country and its people, the Albanian language and dialects, phonology, and morphology. The other chapters contain grammatical explanations in English and examples. (AMH)