A study of Dogrib, an Athapascan language, focuses on long-distance agreement in the case of reflexives. While this "control" relationship has generally been considered in the context of infinitives, it is proposed that evidence from long distance agreement in Dogrib indicates that control is also relevant for languages without…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

The stylistics of belief is the study of the ways in which language is used by speakers to express their beliefs, to convince other people they are right, or to avoid committing themselves to particular beliefs. Such study can contribute to an understanding of the ways in which people misuse and manipulate language for their own ends. The…

Research findings on semantic cohesion within a sentence and its effect on individuals' performance in using the sentences illustrate how research methodology can influence research outcomes. (MSE)

There is significant synchronic evidence of the close relationship between anaphoric and grammatical agreement even within the grammatical structures of a single language. It is possible to predict clear syntactic differences between a grammatical agreement marker and a morphologically incorporated pronoun. What is required is a theory of…

A number of studies on the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase are reviewed. Analysis of the studies and examples used in them indicates that almost any order of adjective seems to be possible depending on the intended meaning of the speaker or the situation in which the speaker frames an utterance. To see if in fact the ordering of…

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…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…

An analysis of the syntax of economics textbooks was undertaken to (1) provide real-language examples of the difficult grammatical structures being taught in an advanced economics reading course, and (2) construct a factual database of the nature of economics textbooks. Five texts representative of those typically used in introductory economics…

An approach to the study of numeral quantifiers in Japanese reveals some fundamental properties of Japanese, especially those pertaining to movement. Using numeral quantifiers, a demonstration shows that the subject of unaccusative verbs in Japanese originates in the object position and moves to the subject position at S-structure. It is also…

The author is presenting a program that she designed for teaching liaison interpreting to translation students in their fifth semester of the translation program at the College of Languages and Translation (COLT), who are starting their training in liaison interpreting. The students never had any interpreting or translation training before. The…

The serial verb construction (SVC) in Edo (Bini), a language spoken in Nigeria, is examined, and an analysis that systematically characterizes the notion of functional relationship of verbs within these constructions is proposed. It is argued that the verbs in series are sensitive to different semantic and grammatical phenomena and are therefore…

The paper explores the significance of a contrast between generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), a context-free grammar with a well structured theory of features, and head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), a mechanism for increasing the power of GPSG by introducing head-wrapping and lexical rules, using examples from Mandarin Chinese.…

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…