Right dislocations are expressions of the following form: (1) "They told the Grand Jury a number of lies, the Nixon men." (2) "We find we have to limit our social schedule, my husband and I." (3) "Mary always wears a frown, the ugly witch." They are found also almost exclusively in the spoken language. This paper…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

This paper defines the grammatical role of a particle in Swahili in terms of the semantic information which it contributes to all utterances in which it occurs. The particle -A occurs in the syntactic configuration Noun 1 -A Noun 2 and has been traditionally described as reflecting relations of possession and attribution between the two nouns in…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

Bull (1965) has proposed that grammatical gender in Spanish is not an intrinsic characteristic of nouns but rather a matter of matching terminal sounds of nouns with those of adjectives and determiners. One implication of this theory is that the child has a cognitive understanding of the matching of terminal noun sounds with particular adjective…

An effective, systematic approach to teaching English articles in English as a second language instruction is described, with specific exercises using the approach presented. Background information on count and non-count nouns and determiners in English is outlined. Four principles underlying the choice of definite or indefinite articles in…

This study examined Norwegian seventh graders' English writing, investigating how close their writing in English was to their writing in Norwegian and how levels of performance in second language writing were linked to broader issues (curriculum guidelines, extensive reading, contact time with the target language, and teacher qualifications).…

A discussion of some occurrences of metaphor in Modern Greek is intended to offer insight to foreign language teachers on the handling of the phenomenon in classroom instruction. Some implications for machine translation are also suggested. First, a brief theoretical account of metaphor points out that metaphor occurs in nearly all discourse and…

Any theory of stylistics sets itself the task of accounting for choices made by a speaker/writer among theoretically available and more-or-less equivalent linguistic structures. This task is a stumbling-block in the way of most attempts to construct a theory of style because there is no consistent method of defining 'available structures' and…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…

An investigation of the first language acquisition of productive nouns in Inuktitut (Inupiaq) is presented. This study begins with descriptions of noun incorporation, relevant aspects of the structure of Inuktitut, and working criteria of productivity. Acquisition data from Inuktitut and corroborating data from Greenlandic are outlined and…

A cloze-type procedure can be used effectively to teach interpreters how to anticipate what the speaker will say, inferring communicative intention. The exercise uses a text from which words are deleted, not randomly as in the true cloze procedure, but in significant locations or contexts. The words or groups of words suppressed are progressively…

This paper addresses itself to the way in which K'ekchi speakers identify the subject and the object in simple sentences. An attempt is made to determine: (1) whether K'ekchi has a basic word order, (2) the possible functions of any derived word order, and (3) whether there are any constraints on the logically possible word orders in K'ekchi. A…

This study is based on a sample of about 100 languages with numeral classifiers. An attempt is made at reconstructing the dynamics of the process by which such systems arise, develop, and decay. Among the hypotheses advanced are the following: (1) numeral classifiers involve the overt expression of one kind of quantification, namely, counting by…

This compilation contains the following research reports on child language: (1) "Nouns: Love 'Em or Leave 'Em" by Dianne Horgan; (2) "Logic in Early Child Language" by Roy D. Pea; and (3) "Theories of the Child's Acquisition of Syntax: A Look at Rare Events and at Necessary, Catalytic, and Irrelevant Components of…