Continuing series on aspects of French grammar. (DS)

Described is a teaching technique designed to eliminate word-by-word reading: the teacher listens to a child read, notes the phrases which are causing difficulty, and writes these phrases on a card so the child can practice them for a few minutes each day. (KC)

Analyzes the syntactic structure of noun phrases and verb phrases in recipes and cookery articles in the French press and argues that the complexity of writing about cooking parallels the complexity of the cooking process itself, demonstrating how syntax can reflect function and meaning in a restricted text-type. (Author/MSE)

Examines the in-class essay as written by university freshmen to assess the extent to which students use formulaic expressions to minimize the cognitive burden of generating a coherent and adequate answer. Results show that students made extensive use of formulaic expressions and shaped their answers to reflect the way the information had been…

Examines "Head Movement" in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). The article shows that in some cases, head movement to an external position need not take place and demonstrates that this movement of the head to a sentence-internal position results from the quantificational nature of IHRCs and Diesing's mapping hypothesis (1990,…

Surveys the growing body of research on formulaic language units--or ready-made chunks and sequences of words. Evidence suggests that these multi-word lexical units facilitate long-term memory storage and fluent language production. Examines formulaic language acquisition in children and adults and discusses applications for teaching. (Author/VWL)

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Analyzes the rightward movement of noun and prepositional phrases in the Early Old English poem "Beowulf." Evidence is provided for heavy noun phrase shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postponed noun phrase, and preposition phrase extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much…

Investigated how prosodic cues in motherese assisted infants' language acquisition. Infants oriented longer to speech interrupted at clausal boundaries than to matched speech interrupted at within-clause locations. The prosodic qualities of motherese provided infants with cues to units of speech that corresponded to grammatical units of language.…

Examination of how French second language learners construct rules for French relativiser morphology found that learners did not make use of a theory of markedness like the accessibility hierarchy for relativization, but rather appeared to construct rules on the basis of the linear ordering of the constituents of restrictive relative clauses in…

Proposes that the optional subject phenomenon in early child language arises because children have not yet acquired the morphological elements (primarily modal and tense) necessary to distinguish subject-taking verbs (e.g., finite verbs) from their non-subject-taking counterparts (e.g., infinitives). (Author/CB)

Twenty different monologues were analyzed; and the interrelating roles that clause relations, lexico-grammatical cohesion, and intonation choices play in creating cohesive monologue were examined. It is argued that these linguistic resources can be exploited by speakers to signal underlying concepts and help listeners interpret the text. (Contains…

Argues that formal English is a prestige dialect containing select constructions so unnatural as to be outside the domain of normal language acquisition. Among these are nominative pronouns used as conjoined subjects. Prestige usage is unavailable for consistent use. While formal education may have some effect on normal usage, that effect is…

A study investigated the effectiveness of teaching French cleft constructions (e.g., "qui est-ce qui...) by three methods: in a contextual presentation; traditionally; and in a presentation influenced by syntactic theory and explaining the internal structure of the phrases. Results suggest formal grammar instruction should focus on familiar…