Instead of teaching three divisions (when-type clauses, conditional clauses, and wish-clauses), two units may be used (possible situations and contrary-to-fact situations). Suggestions are made for interesting class practice. (MSE)

Almost every discussion of technical or scientific writing style mentions the passive voice as a stylistic choice to avoid. However, the passive voice does have legitimate uses in technical and scientific writing--the problem is to define the appropriate or effective uses and the inappropriate or ineffective ones. An examination of passive voice…

The principal claim of this paper is that the Japanese passive consists of two different constructions, each derived from a distinct deep structure and each having associated with it a distinct set of syntactic and semantic properties. One of these constructions, the "adversative passive," implies that the grammatical subject of the…

Analysis of 24 spontaneous speech samples from children at 24 and 30 months revealed a correlated progression in the form, function, and meaning of adjective modifiers used with increased language development. (Author/DEP)

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)

A set of five noun features proposed by Chomsky for characterizing the selectional restriction of English verbs are examined. Examples are presented to show how the "small" set of features is both "too broad" and "too narrow" at once. (SW)

In English there seems to be a large group of so-called reflexive verbs that do not possess any definable reflexive meaning. Grammatical reflexives are distinguishable from semantic reflexives and display considerable variation from one another also. Eight patterns or groupings of verbs are considered. (Author/SW)

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)

This article uses an animate/inanimate distinction in "se" constructions in Spanish to explain how to comprehend the messages conveyed by such constructions. Depending on the verb form, the emphasis may be on the event rather than the performer, or indicate that the speaker accepts no responsibility for the event. (CHK)

The preposing of subject pronouns in questions containing an interrogative word has become common in several Caribbean countries. Use of preposing with "tu,""usted" and "ustedes" is discussed, including its relation to final "s" aspirated or dropped, preservation of morphological oppositions, and increased use of subject pronouns. (CHK)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

This paper describes a demonstration of a totally integrated discovery procedure to present sentence-combining practice. This practice makes students aware not only of the complex structures but of the usage and style related to each structure. Guidelines for the execution of the practice include: (1) the use of a sequence of questions by the…