The dislocation of sentence elements in spoken French is seen as allowing the speaker to free himself from certain constraints imposed on word order, position of accents, and grammar. Dislocation is described, its various functions are enumerated, and implications for second language instruction are outlined. (MSE)

Suggests a method for analyzing structure and process in prose using algorithms based on graph theory and rules based in syntax. Describes application of the method to essays written by 52 fourteen year old pupils on a newly learned topic in chemistry. (Author/GC)

Discusses comparative analysis of spoken and written versions of a narrative to demonstrate that features which have been identified as characterizing oral discourse are also found in written discourse and that the written short story combines syntactic complexity expected in writing with features which create involvement expected in speaking.…

Originally part of a symposium on educational media for the deaf, the paper describes the efforts of the Caption Center at television station WGBH to caption the television production "The scarlet Letter." Among the challenges for the captioners working on the project were the complex syntax and archaic vocabulary and difficulty in the…

Examines the relationship between public relations practitioner and journalist in the transmission of the language of science to the public. The grammatical structure of original press releases was compared with the resulting newspaper stories for both science and nonscience releases to determine differences in syntax and editing. (Author/LRW)

The role of prosodic breaks (PB) in the parsing of locally ambiguous noun phrases (NP) + verb (V) + NP + prepositional phrase (PP) was examined in four word-monitoring experiments. Results indicate that PBs can influence sentence parsing. The article discusses possible mechanisms in the framework of two models. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Replies to issues raised by Bouchard and Dubuisson (B&D) (1995) about American Sign Language (ASL), refuting B&D's assertion that visual-gestural languages are not bound by any universal constraints on word order and reaffirming that ASL is a highly configurational language with a basic underlying syntactic structure as well as an…

Discussion of research into information and text retrieval problems highlights the work with automatic natural language processing (NLP) that is reported in this issue. Topics discussed include the occurrences of nominal compounds; anaphoric references; discontinuous language constructs; automatic back-of-the-book indexing; and full-text analysis.…

Outlines a way of conceiving the area of language identified by case or grammatical relation that does not rely on the specification of universal inventory. The alternative proposes the existence of principles of intelligence, which in their operation in language, yield the language performance that is interpreted as ROLES. (Contains 80…

Describes an information-retrieval schema that takes into account linguistic variation based on phrases. Introduces the phrase-retrieval hypothesis to replace the keyword-retrieval hypothesis, and discusses natural-language processing systems; syntactical, morphological, and lexico-semantical normalization; and future work. (Author/LRW)

Suggests that agent-focus verbs in Tzotzil are inverse, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative obviation status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent-focus verbs and on their use in discourse. (Author/VWL)

Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

Describes HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and its use on the Internet's World Wide Web, including main HTML tags and their syntaxes. Alternatives to HTML, such as Adobe's Acrobat software and Sun's new Java application language, are briefly described. (Author/LRW)

Explains instructional syntax analysis, a tool to demonstrate and analyze the interaction and communication between the computer instructional system and the computer user. Focuses on two areas of technology-based instruction: modeling/visualization and online learning. Discusses the rating of interactivity on scales of immersion and of…

Developmental dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI) were for many years treated as distinct disorders but are now often regarded as different manifestations of the same underlying problem, differing only in severity or developmental stage. The merging of these categories has been motivated by the reconceptualization of dyslexia as a…