A survey of 968 sentences from 20 different college texts used by freshman students revealed that active sentences were the most prevalent of sentence types. Next in order were passives, gerunds, pseudo clefts, factives, infinitives, and clefts. The author found that students made mistakes more frequently in distinguishing actives from passives…

While the prenominal or postnominal position of descriptive adjectives in Spanish has been widely discussed, there is a partial aspect of this topic which is either ignored or dealt with in a perfunctory manner, namely, the possible existence of a semantic principle determining the sequence of descriptive adjectives in coordinate series of two or…

Although Mandarin is a discourse topic oriented language rather than a subject and sentence oriented one, Chinese children acquiring Mandarin attempt in their early speech to exactly mark the same referential grammatical relationships as subject, object, location, and instrument by using case or ergative markers. Only after marking a closed set of…

Two pilot studies are presented in the context of a discussion of the interpretation of anomalous sentences. In the first study, it was shown that naive language users differ in their judgments of the interpretability of semantically anomalous sentences; in the second, that they coincide in their ranking of the appropriateness of various contexts…

Once students can identify main (independent) clauses and main ideas, a simple graphic system will demonstrate whether their sentences are strong and unified. The student underlines the main clause of a sentence and circles the main idea. In a strong, unified sentence, the circle will sit on the line. If the circle does not sit on the line, the…

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

Research in the active-passive verb relation has indicated that there is an interaction between syntactic form and verb semantics among children of preschool age. The present study examines the contribution of active-passive syntax and verb semantics to comprehension difficulty for preschoolers, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults. An additional…

Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical noun phrases (NPs) such as "her, herself, and each other." Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent. A model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of such referentially dependent NPs is presented. These…

Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…

First language acquisition studies reveal that children overextend the minimal distance principle (MDP) during their acquisition of infinitive complement structures. The MDP dictates the interpretation of the logical subject of the infinitive in these structures and overrides marked lexical features such as subject control. Misinterpretations by…

Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

The option of verb-final versus verb-second (V2) order in subordinate clauses in German is subject to regularity when discourse context is taken into account. The artificial rule which places the verb at the end of any subordinate clause obliterates the feel for discourse structure that is still present in colloquial German. The option of using V2…

Summarized were eight studies comparing aspects of sentence comprehension skills in normal and learning disabled (LD) children. Questions such as the following were posed: Does the transformation of kernel sentences to passive negative questions affect sentence comprehension? Does the amount of feedback affect the level of sentence comprehension?…

In order to explore the effect of semantic organization on the comprehension of sentences, this research, based on the hypothesis that fully grammatical sentences would be processed more easily than anomalous sentences, depended on data provided by 20 paid college students serving in individual sessions. Each student listened to 30 tape-recorded…

An analysis of Kilega, a Bantu language spoken in eastern Zaire, focuses on the relative positions of subject and verb and agreement patterns, with particular attention to WH-movement. It is found that Kilega is a subject-verb-object language, but exhibits some variant patterns. WH-movement triggers verb-subject inversion and shifts agreement. The…