Noting that expert computer systems respond to various contexts in terms of knowledge representation, this paper explains that heuristic rules of production, procedural representation, and frame representation have been adapted to such areas as medical diagnosis, signal interpretation, design and planning of electrical circuits and computer system…

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

Predictors of relative clause production in adult second language acquisition were examined through a replication and extension of a study by Schachter (1974). The present study is different in that it was based on oral instead of written production and it was designed to examine avoidance with the consideration that avoidance presupposed choice.…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

The word "grammar" can be defined in at least four different ways: "intuitive grammar," our intuitive sense of sentence structure; "effective grammar," a command of the syntactic resources of the language; "'good' grammar," the use of socially prestigious grammar; and "formal grammar," the systematic study of the structure of the language. Formal…

This paper examines how tagmemics can be equipped with a notational mechanism to account for significant variability phenomena in language. A brief history of variation theory is followed by a proposal for a tentative notational system for marking variants. An illustration of this system is provided through application to various levels of…

In order to indicate the severity of a student's writing difficulties, this paper reproduces portions of his written work in a remedial composition course and examines the following corrective measures attempted by the instructor: shortening all writing assignments, using exercises from basic grammar texts, studying examples of the student's…

Fieldwork with a Hydaburg resident yielded this descriptive paper, which focuses on Haida syntax, and especially predication. The verbal word in Haida is of three distinct types--active, stative, and neutral--the first two of which may occur in either SOV or OSV word order. Neutral verbal words are relatively rare and take active pronouns plus a…

A conservative analysis of simple declarative sentences in Lummi is given in order to clarify the role of the morpheme "ng" (a phonetic approximation of this morpheme) and the order and form of pronouns. In Lummi the combination of the transitivizer and "ng" acts as a passive marker on the verb. However, there are cases where…

This paper attempts to characterize some of the knowledge that people have of their language's semantic structure, in order to determine what a computer has to know to perform the operations of searching for facts and answering questions. Necessarily, this sort of semantic analysis is done in connection with syntactic structure. The meaningful…

When a grammar is expressed in augmented transition network (ATN) form, the problem of detecting syntactic ambuguity reduces to finding all possible paths through the ATNs. Each successfully terminating path through the ATN generates an acceptable parsing of the input string. Two ATN forms, minimal-node and pseudo-tree, are described along with…

This paper discusses the subject of fragments as they appear in the writing of college freshmen. It examines the conditions under which certain syntactic constructions are identified as fragments and the reasons for designating some of these fragments as nonpenalty and others as penalty types. The fragment is viewed here as a syntactic…