Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Analysis of six cross-linguistic properties characterizing the head verb in the resultative construction in Chinese shows that the first verb, and not the second verb, should be analyzed as the head verb. (15 references) (Author/CB)

Describes how two conversants can jointly produce a single syntactic unit, such as a sentence, discussing the types of sentences achieved through joint production, the single utterance construction format, syntax for conversation, interactionally relevant features of talk, and the resources needed to complete an utterance-in-progress. (37…

This paper presents an alternative analysis of tough constructions for N. Chomsky's 1981 wh-movement analysis of tough constructions. To replace Chomsky's solution and to obviate the need for generalized transformations in Government-Binding (GB) theory, an alternative analysis is proposed in which the tough subject originates as an embedded…

This paper describes various aspects of syntactic theory, including lexical, functional, and phrasal categories and how they are put together in clauses and sentences, how words are represented in the mental lexicon, and how noun phrases are assigned structural and semantic information. Language acquisition and the treatment of language disorders…

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)

Discusses the automatic construction of abstracts from the texts of documents. Automatic sentence extraction is examined, including syntactic criteria and semantic relational criteria; textual cohesion is discussed, including the recognition of anaphors and noun phrases; text structure is addressed; and the concept of abstract-frames is described.…

The justification for Kean's (EJ 165 107) analysis of agrammatism as a phonological disorder rests on a certain specific theory of the structure of human language faculty, which is summarized. Simply proposing a competing analysis based on a distinct theory does not falsify the hypotheses. However, Kean's claims are subject to empirical…

This three-paper report describes Nigel, a large, programmed grammar of English which has been created in the framework of systemic linguistics begun by Halliday, and which, in addition to specifying functions and structures of English, has a novel semantic stratum which specifies the situations for use of each grammatical feature. The…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

Reviews several syntactic studies of children's reading comprehension and suggests teaching methods for promoting sentence comprehension in context. (DD)

This article discusses preliminary research that found that more than 90 percent of sentences written by children or for children contain verbs from 1 of 13 verb semantic-syntactic subsets. A strategy for assessing a child's knowledge of verbs from each subset is described, along with an assessment protocol. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Considers the significant divergency of functions of connectives in speech from those of their counterparts in written language and points out that, because learning materials are based mainly on sentence grammars, the former functions are in the main neglected in them. (CB)

This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…