Full verbs and auxiliaries are subject to gapping. In the simplest cases, this construction type involves apparent ellipsis within one or more clausal conjuncts under identity with the finite verb or auxiliary of a preceding conjunct. It has often been suggested that the apparent ellipsis must involve at least a verb. Some researchers see in the…

A study examined 12 preschool children's early use of "who,""what," and "which" questions in spontaneous speech. Results indicated that children began to ask object questions before they asked subject questions, and acquired argument questions before adjunct questions. It was suggested that the two results could…

Children, aged 4-12, performed four tasks designed to test their comprehension of complex sentences that contained main verbs taking underlying sentences as their complements. Tasks involved imperatives, semantic anomalies, truth questioning and short-term memory. (JMB)

Discourse analysis attempts to identify and describe the semantic relationships among units of thought larger than a word (predications). Two basic types of these relationships exist between predications, conceptual and nonconceptual. A conceptual relationship exists between two predications when they share a concept or when a concept in one…

A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

The present study investigated why it is that the more concrete the subject noun phrase of a sentence, the more likely the predicate is to be recalled when the subject noun phrase is the cue. The findings were that concretization dramatically influences both the probability of recognition of the subject noun phrase and the probability of recall of…

This article discusses the nature of the syntactic-autonomy in French, that is, the absence of a correlation between the position of an element in a sequence of discourse and its relative function. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Data obtained from seventh graders does not support Chomsky's hierarchy of language rules, whereby degrees of sentence grammaticality can be assigned to ungrammatical sentences. (RB)

Ordering preferences for English adjectives in attributive (prenominal) and predicative (postnominal) positions were found to be in general agreement. Semantically congruent and incongruent adjectives were compared regarding ordering preferences and a "borrowing" theory is proposed. (CHK)

Examines some of the early uses of instrumental nouns unaccompanied by prepositions and considers the various meanings they conveyed, in order to show the kinds of changes they have undergone. A number of nominal forms have been adverbialized, and some have been replaced by prepositional phrases or other grammatical constructions. (SL)

Reports a study investigating surface structure complexity, transformational sentence type, and sentence length as variables in a sentence imitation task with preschool children. (TO)

Refers to the theory which distinguishes two poles in the organization of speech: the selection of units which can be interchanged in the sentence (paradigmatic pole) and the combination of units simultaneously present in the sentence (syntagmatic pole). (DD)