Discusses the ellipsis of major sentential elements as a pervasive grammatical phenomenon in Japanese conversation and demonstrates its relevance for current theories of discourse or text analysis. (FL)

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Using straightforward, easy-to-understand language, this handbook of English provides hundreds of examples to illustrate in specific detail what is proper in all areas of English grammar, style, and writing. The handbook provides learning exercises at the end of every chapter for a thorough review of the concepts covered in the chapter. The first…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

An analysis is made of three "wh" words -- what, which, and who -- which are most frequently used as interrogative and relative pronouns in English. An attempt is made to find some formal syntactic markers distinguishing these two uses and consequently to postulate distinct feature matrices for them. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

Statistical analyses of the incidence of "what"-questions requiring variably complex responses are presented. The responses were asked of a bilingual child by different sets of caretakers in English and German over a one-year period starting at age 16 months. Results show that the caretakers' questions are geared first toward the child's…

Analysis of the role of paraphrase in the cohesion of everyday oral discourse suggests that combining two methodological approaches to discourse analysis, using distribution of specific discourse elements and sequential relationships within discourse, creates a more empirical foundation for analysis, leading to a more accurate formulation of the…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

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…

A general guideline is offered as a reference point to choosing the appropriate preposition (a or par) for French causative sentences with faire. Full noun phrase complements of infinitives are treated. (SW)

Discusses the rules governing the usage of the indefinite article in Spanish. (HP)

This article reports on a statistical study on the frequency of occurrence of different connectors between simple sentences as seen in texts written by elementary school children, as a function of parent education and occupation, social class and dwelling area of the child. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Points out that the "-ed" participle forms of psychological verbs such as "amuse,""offend,""disappoint," etc. are gaining increasing grammatical acceptance since the "by"-agentive phrase (passive construction) and the adverb "very" co-occur in everyday usage. Results of experiments done…

A linguistic analysis of a German short story examines the techniques which make it a powerful, outstanding story (namely the author's exploitation of the richness of German syntax and semantics) and demonstrates the general value of applying linguistic analysis to works of great literature. (CB)

Discusses problems encountered in the use of possessives in spoken Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)