This textbook of Modern English combines a diachronic and synchronic approach to present a study of English syntax. The book attaches great importance to precise definitions of the various parts of speech and of their grammatical function, and provides a large number of idiomatic examples to illustrate rules and uses. Historical background is…

Hierarchies have been identified as determinants of constituent order. The set of such hierarchies is reviewed and ranked as determinants of NP sequencing in English. The effect of a hierarchy in other languages is compared to and contrasted with what is found in English. (Author/LMO)

This book describes the phonological and grammatical structure of the whole-Dravidian language family from different aspects, examining its history and writing system, structure and typology, lexicon, and recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups. The 11 chapters highlight the following: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., the…

The theoretical linguistic distinction between assertion and presupposition was empirically tested with two groups of subjects, young children acquiring English as their first language and adults acquiring English as a second language. (Author)

Investigates the effect of competing structures (pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax) on the development of Arabic subject-verb agreement morphology and marking in Arabic interlanguage among Australian students of Arabic. Findings indicate that linguistic complexity influences the processing strategies employed and determines the order of…

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…

This paper reports on the process of modifying the ModelCreator item generation system to produce output in multiple languages. In particular, Japanese and Spanish are now supported in addition to English. The addition of multilingual functionality was considerably facilitated by the general formulation of our natural language generation system,…

Six papers on Australian Aboriginal and Islander grammars include: "Repetition of Tiwi at Clause Level" (Marie P. Godfrey); "Iwaidja Verbal Clauses" (Noreen Pym); "Murinbata Noun Clauses" (Chester S. Street); "Clauses in Kala Lagaw Ya" (Rod Kennedy); "Kalaw Kawaw Verbs" (Rod Kennedy); and…

Many influential style guides endorse the stylistic prescription that writers, particularly technical writers, should revise noun compounds into phrasal or clausal paraphrases. While the prescription is well-intentioned, it fails to take into account that a reader's comprehension of compounds, whether long or short, is a complex process dependent…

While all languages use shape to classify unfamiliar objects, some languages as diverse as Mandarin, Thai, Japanese, Mohawk, and American Sign Language lexicalize these and other types of description as noun classifiers. Classification does not develop from a fixed set of features in the object, but is discourse-sensitive and invoked when it would…

This compilation contains the following research reports on child language: (1) "Nouns: Love 'Em or Leave 'Em" by Dianne Horgan; (2) "Logic in Early Child Language" by Roy D. Pea; and (3) "Theories of the Child's Acquisition of Syntax: A Look at Rare Events and at Necessary, Catalytic, and Irrelevant Components of…

Areas of interference between English and the Spanish of some Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Chicago is the subject of this study. Fifty-nine informants were provided with a list of everyday expressions in English, which they were to express in Spanish. The informants were classified according to education, degree of knowledge of English, and degree…

This paper attempts to give a unified view of the workings of noun clauses. These are considered according to three main types corresponding to three different kinds of source sentences. All three types can be used in any usual noun-phrase function, especially subject, direct object, and prepositional object. Four factors which complicate the…

Drawing on recent research on sexism in English and the ways in which social forces affect language structure, this paper shows how prescriptive statements about English have been incorporated into linguistic grammars as descriptions of language. It is claimed that Chomsky's "universal grammar" is masculinist and that it is contradicted…

The purpose of this paper is to show that: (1) language universals have much to offer to students of contrastive linguistics, and (2) in order to make contrastive analysis more meaningful, one ought to go beyond cataloguing mere contrastive structure statements and capture underlying structural tendencies. Some characteristics of word order in…