Harris's original idea of transformations has been changed several times in Chomsky's work. This article explicates these transformations, arguing that though their motivations are highly understandable, these transformations are not necessary for understanding the workings of natural languages. (Author/VWL)

Recommends the "distributional" and transformational grammar approach as especially suitable for developing a teaching grammar for dealing with the French simple infinitive and infinitive with "de". (IFS/WGA)

Examines "do so" and "so do" constructions, with reference to the questions of verb phrase constituency and ambiguity. (AM)

Outlines three senses of the term grammar, why some type of grammar should be taught, the three types of grammatical description that can be taught, and four procedures and four conditions for teaching any type of grammar. (Author/JM)

Discusses the construction "Sentence + no + Noun" in contemporary Japanese. (AM)

Analyzes a selection of papers centered around the idea that it is possible to consider the evidence of language variation in linguistic analysis. The papers were presented at the 1972 colloquium on "New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English," Georgetown University. (AM)

Examines the positive and negative features of traditional, transformational, and notional grammar as they relate to the teaching of French as a foreign language. (AM)

Investigates the pragmatic functions of topicalizing subject (S) and object (O) in Standard Arabic and attempts to find a functional explanation for the occasional preposing/topicalization of S and/or O over the verb (V) to yield a construction in the form of SVO order or any other order sanctioned by the rules of Arabic grammar. (22 references)…

There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective…

A preliminary study of the syntactic characteristics of the imperative construction in modern Chinese is presented. The term "imperative" is used to refer to the type of syntactic construction which is marked by an implicit or explicit second person subject, and which expresses a direct command. Indirect or implied commands expressed by a…

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

Replies to Mellow's (1996) criticism of the authors' second language acquisition model. The article argues that this model is based on the psychological concept of exchange of linguistic information and that Mellow's evaluation of various types of transformational analysis is irrelevant. The article also addresses several points of detail in…

The purpose of this journal is to provide useful exchange of information among Navajo teachers. The articles in this issue deal with Navajo linguistics. Kenneth Hale and Paul Platero present an analysis of the relative clause in Navajo. Part 1 analyzes relativization forms and formulates structural descriptions for relativization rules, with…

Traces the history of linguistic theory as it has affected the field of second language instruction. (AM)

Discusses the continuing controversy over how to teach grammar. Finds that the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches each have their strengths and weaknesses, with none clearly better than the others. Suggests that the teaching of grammar, while not the key to improvement in written English, will always have a place in the…