A correspondence is shown between grammatical categories and grammatical functions in Chinese. Some syntactic properties distinguish finite verbs from nonfinite verbs, nominals from other categories, and verbs from other categories. (Contains seven references.) (LB)

A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to…

This paper reports the results of a dual-task experiment which investigates the nature of working memory resources used in sentence comprehension. Participants read sentences of varying syntactic complexity (containing subject-and object-extracted relative clauses) while remembering one or three nouns (similar to or dissimilar from the…

As a new faculty member, the author was invited by colleagues to help protect a resource they believed was essential to their instructional program. The importance of teaching grammar in a didactic fashion as a precursor to student writing constituted an unchallenged belief in the department. Faculty members were committed to the notion that…

The article discusses language structures of three hierarchical levels of event descriptions: (1) single-action events (semantic relations, aspectual meaning and lexical verbs or verb phrases, (2) event relations (tense markers, conjunctions, adverbs, perfect tense); (3) event schemas (lexical terms and phrases marking beginnings and endings). A…

Analyzes the "easy to be V" structure in terms of the semantic features of sentences with this structure. These sentences can be classified into types, ranging from the "prototype" with the most features contributing to its transparency, to the "peripheral" with the fewest of such features. (Author/CB)

Discusses the Rhode Island School for the Deaf's use of Matthew Lipman's Philosophy for Children Program, focusing on how the relationship of philosophy and logic to language structure affect such instruction with deaf students and providing some suggestions for effective instruction. (32 references) (CB)

Examines the effect of the misuse and over-use of logical connectives in English-as-a-Second-Language undergraduate writing, and suggests that students use a small subset of relatively comprehensible connectives, employ connectives for phrasal expansion, and view logical progression as an integral stage in writing. (Author/CB)

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

In their efforts to understand the grammar of English as a second language, students often confuse the two roles that grammatical elements play: form and function. A classroom technique for helping students distinguish between the two is to create playful analogies for specific structures, in which students must use reasoning to determine the form…

The Read/Write for Personal and Economic Growth program starts with the writing of three-sentence paragraphs that contain a topic sentence and two major detail sentences. The program begins with short passages so that adult learners can experience immediate success. As learners progress, they receive help on such problems as sentence fragments,…

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…

The application of the "back-propagation" learning algorithm to the task of determining the right set of features corresponding to the words in an input sentence is described. Features that are specific to particular nouns and verbs, that indicate whether a nominal constituent is singular or plural, definite or indefinite, and that…

Appropriate uses of "des" and "les" in the description of individuals' physical attributes are outlined according to a grammatical model of sentence structure. Several examples of each usage are provided. (MSE)