Four categories of statements are isolated in an attempt to analyze relationships between voice, tense and use of auxiliaries in French. The deep structure theory of generative grammar is questioned and a theory of semantic distinctions operating within the forms of a language is proposed. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A summary of problems in the study of structural complexity. Within the framework of a "morphology of utterances," the following topics are addressed: the criteria of intuition and common sense; the relationship of complexity of language and thought; and the possibility of a purely linguistic measure of complexity. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

The organization of repair in a corpus of conversations in the Lue, Yuan (or Myang), and Siamese dialects of Tai is examined with regard to the preference for self-correction described previously for an English corpus. In both, repair is an identically organized sequential phenomenon involving repair segments during conversation. (CHK)

This paper formulates a semantic distinction between predicates in Japanese which take indirect questions and those which cannot, and advances a hypothesis that the former crucially involve in their semantics the absence, acquisition, presence, and loss of information relevant in certain ways. (Author)

Nominalization of possessive sentences in Russian is discussed. It is maintained that all lexical surface items originate as terms in a situation model, and that their actualization as different parts of speech is language-specific. Language data are used to support a locative interpretation of the semantic model. (CHK)

Examined with 15 linguistically normal and 15 linguistically deviant male children (5 to 7-years-old) was the ability to judge as right or wrong, and to change the sentences judged as wrong, three types of agrammatical sentences. (IM)

Sector analysis (in which the three parts of a simple sentence are the subject, predicate, and sentence adverbial) provides clear steps for developing literal questions. Research indicates that those based on the predicate lead to more learning and better understanding. (JM)

An "organization of repair" operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism producing a skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair.…

Describes how traditional rules that explain the position of adverbs in English are not always adequate due to unconsidered criteria. More precise position rules need to be formulated, including a clearer approach to distinguishing when adverbials modify subjects or verbs. More accurate adverbial position rules are presented and discussed in…

Studies the variety of Arabic imperative sentences seen as a result of interrelated sets of choices from a limited number of binary systems, and accounts for their occurrence in certain situations. Relevant features of Arabic imperative structures are compared with their nearest English equivalents. (CB)

The article discusses language structures of three hierarchical levels of event descriptions: (1) single-action events (semantic relations, aspectual meaning and lexical verbs or verb phrases, (2) event relations (tense markers, conjunctions, adverbs, perfect tense); (3) event schemas (lexical terms and phrases marking beginnings and endings). A…