This paper describes a set of sentence meaning skills which has been identified to help teachers better focus their instruction in reading comprehension. The specific skills in the sentence meaning strand are developed through two sets of objectives: an analysis aspect, where the focus is on identification and understanding of details, and a…

A study investigated whether or not the global structure of a text influences its readability and how that influence might be related to the already recognized influences of vocabulary and sentence length. The subjects, 250 fourth-grade students in Quebec, each read four texts representing four different structures, four subjects, and two levels…

An investigation of how Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight interpret sentences involving the universal quantifier "mei" ("every") and the quantificational adverbs "dou" ("all") and "quan" ("all") focused on how and when the child acquires adult interpretations of the…

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,…

Current usage of third person direct and indirect object pronouns in textbooks, literature, and oral language is examined, and graded exercises and techniques stressing the practical, communicative function of these pronouns are suggested. Classroom drills and variations are proposed based on an examination of 30 first-year college texts that…

The theoretical generalization that no lexical material can occur between a Wh-element and a verb in any clause in Basque is challenged, and it is argued that case is not assigned structurally in the Basque language. The account demonstrates how a number of well documented properties of Basque may combine to produce this grammatical result, and an…

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…

The order of constituents in Finnish clauses having free word order is analyzed. It is proposed that these clauses are defined only in terms of their immediate constituency, and that the logically possible permutations of these constituents form another set of sequence constructions, which transcend individual clause types. Each sequence…

Because Mandarin Chinese is a language without much morphology in case, number, and gender; i.e., an uninflectional analytical language in which word order plays a decisive role in determining the semantics of a sentence; it seems inconvenient to investigate the language in the framework of relational grammar (RG); which depends heavily on case…

A recurring question in the study of the specialized English used in various technical disciplines is the degree to which contextual variables--including subject matter--account for the particular distributions of lexicogrammatical features in texts of different disciplines. Two contextual variables related to role relationships in the semiotic…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…

The constraints in English on the definiteness, specificity, humaness and animacy of noun phrases (NP's) undergoing passive and dative movement are examined. Evidence presented shows that these constraints occur in other languages in marked and unmarked constructions as absolute constraints on acceptability or as tendencies. This suggests a…