Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…

It is argued that in Russian verbs the perfect aspect is marked and the imperfect unmarked is wrong. For certain lexical classes, the imperfective rather than the perfective is marked. A systematic interrelationship among aspect, tense, and type of action is developed. (PMJ)

Examines topicalization in Haida, describes its role in the language, and describes the particles used to mark it. (Author/AM)

Examples illustrate that there are possible independent meanings of the imperfective, possessing stronger modality than the perfective in the Russian verb system. This is examined in past tense, infinitive, and imperative structures. (PMJ)

Argues that the fundamental word order of Mandarin Chinese is SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), and describes word order change from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese. (AM)

Examines constituent order in Haida sentences. (AM)

Uses data from American Sign Language complement structures to show that a syntactic theory is needed to account for these in a formal way. Constraints on the forms of these structures are discussed in terms of syntactic constraints, rather than pragmatic or functional conditions. (Author/AMH)

Reflexives in Japanese and English show a number of interesting differences. Morphologically, there is a single form "jibun" ("jishin") in Japanese, which does not vary for person or number. In English there are various forms which always agree in person and number ("myself,""himself,""themselves,"…

Describes the "Small Valence Lexicon," a dictionary of 461 of the most commonly used German verbs, with information about their morphosyntactic characteristics and the sentence structures in which they occur. Some of the problems faced by the authors of the dictionary in applying the valence theory to their description of verbs is discussed. (MS)

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)

Describes the longitudinal emergence of verb inflections as observed in the speech of four American English-speaking children emphasizing occurrence of inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and their conditional use. Discusses results in terms of sentence relations between verbs and other constituents and the semantics of verb…

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Explores the semantics and pragmatics of indefinite descriptions. It is argued that indefinite descriptions are not semantically ambiguous and that their various interpretations may be explained on the basis of general communicative principles. He shows that his proposed analysis can account for generic and predicative interpretations. (45…

Descriptive grammars based on sets of rewrite rules were constructed to summarize the structure and organization of 120 entries in a second grade student's journal of class news. These rules illuminated the relationship between experience, abstraction, and generation of structure, and the use of structure to express complex thoughts. (PMJ)

Argues that the nature of mental representation contributes little to the specification of synchronic syntactic competence. Psycholinguists, syntacticians, and morphologists can benefit from a collaborative approach to the construction of an integrative model of language and mind, covering competence, representation, processing, and acquisition.…