Deaf Learners' Acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two…

The class of English words traditionally called adverbs is examined and redefined in this paper. The following three subclasses of adverbs are identified: limiters, which are words that modify noun phrases; intensifiers, which are words that modify adjectives; and "true" adverbs, which modify verb phrases and sentences. Examples of these…

Describes a comparative study of interrogative words in Spanish and English, which resulted in a series of hypotheses about the way Spanish speakers convey the interrogative how plus adjective or adverb. To test the hypotheses, surveys were conducted with native Spanish speakers. Surveys and results are discussed. (AMH)

Zwicky's analysis of syntactic notions as possible candidates for "head," based on constituent-structure theory, is discussed in detail. This analysis is contrasted with the results gained form one provided in a dependency-based theory in which "head" is the name of a grammatical relation category. (Author/LMO)

This volume contains ten articles and a book review. Josef Vachek talks about "Vilem Mathesius as Forerunner of Contrastive Linguistic Studies." In "Contrastive Generative Grammar and the Psycholinguistic Fallacy," Andrew Chesterman discusses methods for accounting for simplification in foreign language learning. Michael Post compares "English…

To express that a degree of one event is conditioned by (or paralleled by) a degree of another, the "the...the..." construction with a comparative after each "the" is used. Examples include sentences such as: (1) the more dangerous mountains are to climb, the more challenging they are; (2) the more often a man has been in…

Discusses the possessive constructions in English, in particular, the postponed construction. (An example of the postponed construction is "a book of John's," contrasted with "John's book," the preposed construction.) The study contrasts the possessive "of" with the "of" in other constructions and concludes…

Discusses the types of arguments available for settling questions of phonological constituency. On the basis of these arguments the most frequently assumed syllable structure is selected in which the relationship between "Peak" and "Coda" is closer than that between "Peak" and "Onset." (Author/LMO)

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…

Challenges the idea that grammatical representations in second-language development are parametric values that are transferred from the learner's native language, offering learner data incompatible with this view. Advocates a weak transfer model in which lexical and functional projections transfer, but morphology-driven values of features like the…

This report documents efforts over a five-month period toward completion of a pilot system for machine translation of German scientific and technical literature into English. The report is divided into three areas: grammar formalism, programming, and linguistics. Work on grammar formalism concentrated mainly on increasing the power of the…

This research project was designed to analyze by quantitative methods a corpus of writing produced by four groups of American college students enrolled in German courses and by one group of professional German writers. Analysis was undertaken in order to determine whether or not significant quantitative differences in the use of selected syntactic…

This paper argues: (1) that one of the major syntactic constraints adopted by many proponents of the Extended Standard Theory, namely the Specified Subject Condition (SSC), is empirically inadequate with respect to "unbounded" extraction phenomena; and (2) that the unbounded extraction data which the SSC purported to account for need to be…

The second volume in this series contains three articles dealing with various aspects of Romanian-English contrastive analysis. The first articles, "The Contrastive Morphophonology of Romanian and English," by Anca Belchita-Hartular, aims at a descriptive analysis of the phonological aspect of inflection in Romanian and English, in an attempt to…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…