Background: Despite its importance, in-depth analysis of connected speech is often neglected in the diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) -- especially for the logopenic variant (lvPPA) for which unreliable differential diagnosis has been documented. Only a few studies have been conducted on this topic in lvPPA. Aims: The aim of this…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

Background: Young children's speech is typically more linguistically sophisticated than their writing. However, there are grounds for asking whether production of cohesive devices, such as verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), might represent an exception to this developmental pattern, as cohesive devices are generally more important in writing than in…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

Kuno's direct discourse analysis is examined and rejected, and the Prague School concepts of theme and rheme are shown to be relevant to Kuno's data and additional data. It is further shown that an incompatible application of two or more transformations produces sentences that tend to be bad. (SC)

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

The descriptive contents (cognitive meanings) of the modals "can,""may,""could,""might,""must,""need,""ought,""should," compared with paraphrastic verbs and adjectives, motivate two cross-classifying dimensions: logical modality (possibility, impossibility, necessity)…

The Thai Discourse Analysis Project seeks to provide a description of linguistic structures of importance in understanding the nature of Thai speech. Previous studies have been limited, and restricted to consideration of the written language and "literary" speech. The project consists of three phases: the acquisition of recorded texts,…