This investigation studied the development of the form and function of negative sentences, and how it relates to the input on negation that children receive from their parents. The data came from three children: two from a previous study (Bellugi) and one the son of the investigators. A detailed analysis was carried out of the syntactic form and…

This study considers the interaction of syntactic and pragmatic factors (social and cognitive) in children's production of coordinate structures involving conjunction reduction. Two aspects of pragmatic context were considered: (1) the pattern of uncertainty or redundancy in a complex action sequence, and (2) the perceptual grouping of objects…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…

This paper examines the factors which govern the use of infinitives and gerunds after verbs and uses American literature and periodicals since 1945 for examples of this usage. The analysis was undertaken in order to clarify this usage for those teaching or learning English as a second language. Studies yielded three general rules for the use of…

In an attempt to apply recent developments in transformational grammar to Latin syntax, this report analyzes first English, then Latin sentences for both deep and surface structures through transformational and phrase structure grammar methods. Auxiliary nodes, problems of Latin verb complimentation, and the gerund and gerundive constructions are…

An analysis of part-of-speech membership was made utilizing certain mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the nature of word classes. It was proposed that words of the same form class constitute "verbal habit families" on the basis of either a common grammatical meaning response, a common affix, or a common label (e.g., "verb"). One…

This paper describes the notation and underlying organization of an augmented, recursive-transition network grammar and illustrates how such a grammar is a natural medium for expressing and explaining a wide variety of facts about the psychological processes of sentence comprehension. A general discussion of transformational grammar and…

The designation of the Japanese word class "joshi" (in English known as particles, post-positional case markers, or relationals) by the term te-ni-wo-ha can be traced to the early superimposition of the Chinese writing system on Japanese speech. Because of the structural differences between the two languages and the existence of elements in…

This paper considers Spanish adjectives and the possibility of converting some adjectives into adverbs, keeping the same general significance of a sentence. The conversion of an adjective into an adverb under these circumstances can be accomplished through a transformation which can be applied to a particular logical-semantic structure. The author…

This collection of articles written over a period of 10 years concerning the transformational syntax of English has been divided into six sections. The articles in the first section provide background material for the reader with no specialized linguistic preparation. They present the fundamental questions that linguists are now asking, some of…

This study, contrasting grammatical structures in English and Hungarian, considers those areas of grammar in the two languages which would cause the greatest interference for the native English speaker learning Hungarian. The choice of topics is based on the author's personal observation, both of English speakers learning Hungarian and of…

Examines the idea of a mismatch between grammaticality and acceptability. Evidence is used to refute the claim that ungrammatical but acceptable sentences are theoretically plausible in the case of the sentence, "A not unhappy person entered the room." (AMH)

Presents a fully incremental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. Discusses the principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant on the basis of three online experiments on noun phrase and prepositional phrase…

The pragmatic function of conveying given and new information is one of the most important universal communicative functions that language serves. This study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children and adults utilize surface cues of word order, marked grammatical structure, and emphatic stress to determine whether information is given or new…

This guide is designed to help college-level teachers of English as a Second Language address the particular linguistic characteristics and instructional needs of native Chinese-speaking students. The first chapter profiles four Chinese students at the City College of New York, focusing on their basic literacy in Chinese, immigration issues,…