The movements of such higher predicates as time, locative, and complementation verbs are studied, and Tai's Predicate Placement Constraint is rejected as an incorrect account of predicate movements in Chinese. It is proposed, on the other hand, that there is only leftward movement involving predicates in Chinese. (Author)

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

"Writeability" is concerned with helping writers and editors produce materials on easier readability levels. A major input of most readability formulas is vocabulary difficulty. One way to increase readability is to use simple vocabulary or shorter words since word frequency studies show that more common words are shorter. The other…

Describes, adducting many examples, the external relative clause, discussing it from the pedagogical standpoint. This type of clause, belonging to normal speech, and not being merely a stylistic matter, belongs in the basic course. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Utilizing careful, empirical definitions of lesson kinetic structure, the authors tested two hypotheses: student content achievement is directly related to lesson content structure; and, awareness of commonality and theme development is directly related to lesson content structure. Student achievement seems to be related to communication…

Examines several subtypes of the verbal sequency NP-VP1-VP2 in Chinese, especially those involving descriptions of human action, directed motion, and instrumental functions, and finds that these could be subsumed under the heading of "purposive clauses." The VP1 states an action whose goal is fulfilled by the action performed in VP2. (Author/RM)

Deals with certain problems inherent in deriving anaphoric pronouns from bound variables. Syntactic rules applied to determine anaphora relations cannot be applied if anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents have identical underlying forms. An approach to anaphora which preserves some advantages of the bound-variable theory without the problems is…

The writing of ESL students, while sophisticated in some respects, often contains fragments and run-ons. Because these students have no reliable, self-monitoring system for analyzing their writing and because they believe they are communicating effectively, they fail to recognize their difficulties in forming complete sentences. This paper…

This paper challenges the characterization of bilingual behavior derived from the code-switching model, and especially the notion of linguistic independence on which psychological studies of bilingualism have focused almost exclusively. While linguists have concentrated on the situational determinants of code-switching, psychologists have focused…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

This research deals with how extraction rules are constrained in cases where their unconstrained application would give rise to semantic ambiguity. Of particular concern is the application of extraction rules to noun phrases (NP's) where word order is the only indication of the different syntactic functions of two adjacent NP's. Samples from…

IN THIS SECOND VOLUME (CHAPTER V) OF A THREE-PART SERIES ON HAUSA SYNTAX, THE EMPHASIS IS ON THE FUNCTION RATHER THAN THE FORM OF WORDS. (THE FIRST VOLUME DISCUSSES SYNTAX AND THE THIRD DEALS WITH SPECIFIC TEXTS.) IN ADDITION TO THOROUGH TREATMENT OF THE PARTICULAR HAUSA FUNCTION WORDS, A SMALL GROUP OF WORDS WITH FREQUENT OCCURRENCE AND HIGHLY…

IN THIS EXPERIMENT ERRORS WERE SYSTEMATICALLY INTRODUCED INTO A SERIES OF SENTENCES TO STUDY THEIR EFFECT ON RECOGNITION AND RECALL OF THE SENTENCES. THE SUBJECTS, 32 ADULTS, WERE SHOWN SLIDES OF SENTENCES CONTAINING A SINGLE ERROR ("THE IMPATIENT COMPOSED A SYMPHONY FOR THE ORCHESTRA") AS WELL AS CONTROL SENTENCES WITHOUT ERRORS. THE VIEWING TIME…

The author feels that although the problem of pronominalization and of reference in general is at the very heart of syntactic investigation, transformational grammarians are unable to deal adequately with these problems. He finds their theory of referential indices (Chomsky, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax") "completely beyond…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…