This report discusses the stress patterns of Bengali as spoken in Bangladesh. One of the findings indicate that every word has stress in the first syllable, with additional stress in the first syllable of the first word of the phrase. The Bengali language does not have penultimate and antepenultimate stress. Because there is no rule for changing…

The speech of five native English-speakers and five native Japanese-speaking learners of English as a Second Language was analyzed for use of "will" and "going to" in certain contexts. Subjects were asked to tell their summer plans and to express their expectations of changes in Japan and the United States in the next few years. Results indicate…

A study was undertaken to develop a partial credit scheme for scoring cloze-type questions on an English collocation test, obtain construct validity evidence for the test and the scoring scheme using the Rasch Partial Credit Model, and compare partial credit scoring with the more commonly used dichotomous scoring with the same test instrument.…

"Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics" is intended as a forum for the presentation of the latest original research by the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics and other related departments of the University of Kansas. Papers in this volume include: "Some Issues in Japanese Accent" (Kenneth Miner);…

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

The double-verb construction in Mbya Guarani is described. In this construction, the second verb (V2) has a distinctive morphology. It is concluded that the construction, examined from several viewpoints (lexico-semantic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic) is a phrase in which V2 functions as a modifier of V1, and that is different from…

A study of children's acquisition of the auxiliary verb system in English is reported. The first section describes the operation of the auxiliary system, and proposes that the behavior of auxiliaries is so complicated that if children were to generalize from one auxiliary to another, they would make predictable errors. The second section reviews…

This article discusses the nominalizer /-qa/ in Hopi, looking specifically at nominalizations in /-qa/ without head nouns, sentential complements in /-qa/, and relative clauses in /-qa/. (CLK)

An analysis of indirect object passives in English and their development from Late Old English and Early Middle English suggests that their existence is related to the development of double object constructions. As long as the dative and accusative cases had not merged, neither pronominal nor nominal indirect objects required a preposition;…

This study reports the use of automated textual analysis on a French novel. An introductory section chronicles the history of artificial intelligence, focusing on its use with natural languages, and discusses its application to textual syntax. The first chapter examines computational linguistics in greater detail, looking at its relationship to…

Some of the problems inherent in a word-based hypothesis asserting that the word/stem is taken as the minimal sign not only for syntax but also for morphology are examined in an analysis of a polysynthetic language, Koyukon, an Athabaskan language of Alaska. Data from the Central dialect is considered in the analysis. A brief sketch of the verbal…

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

A self-instructional program in the French subjunctive mood is organized by categories of verbs requiring the subjunctive. Within each category, directions are given for using the verbs, and exercises are prescribed with sample sentences. The exercises consist of pattern drills and translations. A post-test is included. (MSE)

A study of the semantic factors determining the choice of "go to" and "will" in some varieties of spoken English looks at intentionality and premeditation, imminence, observation, presence on the scene of action, certainty, inference and observation, knowledge and certainty, present relevance and immediacy of action, children's acquisition of…

Points of similarity and contrast between English and Modern Standard Arabic in relativization are examined. It is concluded that while the relativization process is essentially the same in both languages, they differ with respect to the relative pronoun, the agreement of the relative pronoun with its antecedent, and the appearance of the…