Dynamic and interactive uses of personal pronouns are usually not as neat as traditional grammar describes in that the first and second person pronoun index speakers and addressees in a speech event. Devoted to a prevalent feature of Mandarin Chinese conversation--the switch of the first person singular pronoun "wo", "I", and the second person…

The class of English words traditionally called adverbs is examined and redefined in this paper. The following three subclasses of adverbs are identified: limiters, which are words that modify noun phrases; intensifiers, which are words that modify adjectives; and "true" adverbs, which modify verb phrases and sentences. Examples of these…

Responds to criticism of an earlier (1984) paper in which it was argued that the complements of Welsh control and raising verbs should be analyzed as verb phrases (VPs) and not as clauses with empty subjects. The l984 position is defended against the traditional analysis in the three critiqued areas.

Prepared as part of a project designed to provide an objectively measured indication of the quality of student writing in one school district, this paper presents analyses of the syntactic complexity of the argumentative and narrative writing of more than 500 seventh and eighth grade students and of the mechanical errors found in that writing.…

This paper examines the question of whether two labels should be used for the units traditionally called "sentence" and "clause" or whether the same label should be used and the units distinguished in some other way. Proponents of a two-level analysis have traditionally argued that sentences and clauses can have different…