The ability of English as a second language (ESL) readers to comprehend different types of nominal compounds in English technical literature was investigated. College students were asked to recover the meaning of 73 nominal compounds in two technical English language articles on occupational health and safety. The intermediate and advanced ESL…

A first and modest beginning toward a grammar of the Hualapai language, a Pai branch of the Yuman language family, this reference book is intended for use by: the Hualapai people to reaffirm the vitality of their language; the Hualapai teachers in their preparation of language materials for teaching; younger Haulapais to find the regularity and…

The 'determiner' category was originally set up by structuralists for identifying nouns. The rewrite rule for 'determiners' in transformational generative grammar is inadequate for showing correspondences between type and token. An appraisal of quantity terms might eliminate the concept of the 'determiner,' and replace that category with one of…

The morphemes /-k/ and /-m/ function as nominal case endings and as verbal syntactic and derivational suffices. They are also polysemous rather than homophonous in Yavapai. Many verbal suffixes are accounted for by the referent-switching rule, indicating the subject of a verb in relation to the next highest verb. (SC)

Research supported by the Cooperative Research Program of the U.S. Office of Education, CRP-S-378.

Recently collected evidence shows the likely existence of twelve South American Indian languages with object-initial word order. This is contrary to what had been generally predicted in the literature on word order typology before 1977. Numerous examples are provided of OVS (Object-Verb-Subject) and OSV (Object-Subject-Verb) word order, primarily…

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

This reference grammar is a description of the speech of educated people of the Bangalore/Mysore area of Karnataka State in South India. This particular dialect is used in films and, to some extent, on the radio. The four sections of the book deal with: (1) phonology, (2) the noun phrase, (3) the verb phrase, and (4) syntax. Each item that is…

A descriptive grammar of Ewondo, a Northwest Bantu language spoken in southern Cameroon, Africa is presented. Ewondo is a dialect cluster which is part of a larger dialect cluster usually called Yaunde-Fang. The variety of Ewondo presented is based on the speech of a single individual, who comes from Yaounde-Eturi. Occasional references to other…

THIS STRUCTURALLY-ORIENTED OUTLINE OF BIELORUSSIAN PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGY IS ONE OF THE VERY FEW DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTIC WORKS ON BIELORUSSIAN WRITTEN IN A WESTERN LANGUAGE. THE AUTHOR INCLUDES SECTIONS ON--(1) THE PHONOLOGY AND WRITING SYSTEM, (2) MORPHOPHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS, (3) NOUNS, (4) ADJECTIVES, (5) PRONOUNS, (6) NUMERALS, AND (7) VERB…

This volume contains ten articles and a book review. Josef Vachek talks about "Vilem Mathesius as Forerunner of Contrastive Linguistic Studies." In "Contrastive Generative Grammar and the Psycholinguistic Fallacy," Andrew Chesterman discusses methods for accounting for simplification in foreign language learning. Michael Post compares "English…

The categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most…

THIS REPORT DISCUSSES HOW NOUNS AND THEIR ADJUNCTIVES ARE USED IN MANDARIN SENTENCES IN DENOTING THE RELATION BETWEEN SETS AND THEIR SUBSETS. LANGUAGE HAS SOME MEANS OF SPECIFYING SETS OF OBJECTS, ACTIONS, OR ABSTRACT UNITS IN VARIOUS WAYS, IN ORDER TO HAVE SUCCESSFUL COMMUNICATION. LANGUAGE DOES NOT BEAR THE ENTIRE BURDEN OF SPECIFYING A CERTAIN…

This article, written in Russian, propounds the application of the contrastive method in teaching the morphology of Russian to English-speaking students. The presentation is based on categorization by parts of speech. Included here is a comparative analysis of nouns (gender, number, case, expression of definite and indefinite articles),…

Research studies have demonstrated that children tend to define nouns by describing first their function and later the object to which they refer. In a study devised to trace the development of noun definition in the language of grade school children and adults, 20 subjects from each of four grade levels (kindergarten and grades two, four, and…