Reading teachers of the 1980s need to be confident not only about the key issues but also about their own knowledge of the issues when making decisions. Two issues from the seventies (reading as a developmental process and reading as a psycholinguistic process) combine with the broad notion of textlinguistics as important areas of knowledge for…

This document traces the history of sentence combining, from Ney's study in 1966 and Mellon's study in 1969 to recent research conducted by Ney and supported by the Research Foundation of the National Council of Teachers of English. Studies by O'Hare (1973), Ney (1975), Combs (1975), Perron (1974), Green (1972), Hunt and O'Donnell (1969), Miller…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

This research deals with how extraction rules are constrained in cases where their unconstrained application would give rise to semantic ambiguity. Of particular concern is the application of extraction rules to noun phrases (NP's) where word order is the only indication of the different syntactic functions of two adjacent NP's. Samples from…

Although the nature of topicalization is complex and cannot be easily separated from considerations of syntactic structure and sentence focus, analysis of language usage has indicated that topicalization is more a stylistic than a syntactic process. Topicalization refers to moving a noun phrase (NP) into the initial position of a sentence.…

IN THIS SECOND VOLUME (CHAPTER V) OF A THREE-PART SERIES ON HAUSA SYNTAX, THE EMPHASIS IS ON THE FUNCTION RATHER THAN THE FORM OF WORDS. (THE FIRST VOLUME DISCUSSES SYNTAX AND THE THIRD DEALS WITH SPECIFIC TEXTS.) IN ADDITION TO THOROUGH TREATMENT OF THE PARTICULAR HAUSA FUNCTION WORDS, A SMALL GROUP OF WORDS WITH FREQUENT OCCURRENCE AND HIGHLY…

A corpus of Black English (BEV) data is re-examined with exclusive attention to the "is" form of the copula. This analysis differs from previous examinations in that more constraints have been introduced, and the Cedergren/Sankoff computer program for multivariant analysis has been employed. The analytic techniques that are used allow for a finer…

Forty adults served as subjects in a study of the comprehensibility of instructions conditioned by multicategory compounds, such as "If you are male, or both married and not employed, go to question 3." The stimulus materials were 96 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press (button) Y," in which "X" was…

The sentence intonation of Panjabi (a tone language) is described, as it is spoken in the district of Sialkot in West Pakistan. A system of phonetic transcription is established, and the intonation of sentences and questions is treated in two chapters. (JB)

IN THIS EXPERIMENT ERRORS WERE SYSTEMATICALLY INTRODUCED INTO A SERIES OF SENTENCES TO STUDY THEIR EFFECT ON RECOGNITION AND RECALL OF THE SENTENCES. THE SUBJECTS, 32 ADULTS, WERE SHOWN SLIDES OF SENTENCES CONTAINING A SINGLE ERROR ("THE IMPATIENT COMPOSED A SYMPHONY FOR THE ORCHESTRA") AS WELL AS CONTROL SENTENCES WITHOUT ERRORS. THE VIEWING TIME…

Four types of sentences differing in grammaticalness and amount of association between component words were presented to 80 educable mentally retarded children for recall after varying delay intervals. The children (all male and between the ages of nine and 14) sat quietly during the delay intervals of named numbers from a memory drum. The results…

The author feels that although the problem of pronominalization and of reference in general is at the very heart of syntactic investigation, transformational grammarians are unable to deal adequately with these problems. He finds their theory of referential indices (Chomsky, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax") "completely beyond…

This paper reviews some of the observations made by Vygotsky about the structure and content of inner speech and its precursor egocentric speech, also called private speech. Recent advances in certain areas of linguistics are used to clarify and develop these observations. In particular, the paper focuses on Vygotsky's ideas about the predicative…

Teaching students the traditional terminology for sentences is unnecessary and provides them little or no help in improving their writing. This paper outlines the most common difficulties in students' sentences and describes a simplified working vocabulary for teaching students how to solve their sentence problems. The paper shows the methods and…

In an experiment conducted with 31 three-, four- and five-year-old Japanese children evidence was found for self-created definitions of the direct and indirect objects of verbs. Linguistic rules undergoing change during the course of the experiment were also observed. The results can be understood as showing that children are guided in their…