The influence of children's levels of field-dependence-independence on their performance with the passive transformation was investigated. Eighty 6th graders, classified as field-dependent or field-independent, were presented with sentence-question combinations, each in either the active or passive voice, and numbers of correct responses were…

Formal grammar study is important in schools above the elementary level because it can lead to improved understanding of the nature and functions of language. Although newer grammars, based on structural linguistics and transformational-generative grammar, have not met the needs of the schools, their potential should not be ignored with a return…

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children aged 2;0 to 13;11 and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. Full passives were classified as reversible (The dog was chased by the girl), instrumental non-reversible (The lamp was broken by [or with] the ball), or agentive non-reversible (The lamp was broken…

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

The inadequacies of traditional and transformational models of grammar are overcome in the systemic-functional approach of Halliday, where meaning is built into the grammar and the text is the basic unit. Here, the functional approach is seen in the stress on the role of social/cultural context and in the importance of the role of register, which…

A number of grammatical transformations are studied which often, but not always, involve the movement of constituents. Data from English, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Thai are investigated in an attempt to discover a principle (of potentially universal scope) that governs certain constraints that must be imposed on these…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

This is a state-of-the-art review of word formative morphology. The paper surveys three loosely knit 'schools' of word formation: (1) the Generative school, (2) the Continental school, and (3) the Slavicist school. It points out that much work in word formation is being duplicated because of a lack of coordination and communication between the…

This paper describes and gives the results of a psycholinguistic experiment investigating the impact of certain surface syntactic structures on the perception and memory of language. The basic assumption is that the content of an utterance must be its most salient aspect in memory. The for of an utterance, its surface grammar and phonology, must…

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…

A review of the various grammatical traditions from traditional grammar through structural linguistics to transformational grammar points out that traditional and transformational grammar are neither mutually exclusive nor entirely contradictory. Implications drawn from modern inquiry include the necessity for reading and writing teachers to guide…

Grammatical transfer is used to render the values and meanings of the structures in Romanian pronouns into English. This device can be used in explaining the exact nuances of Romanian pronouns to speakers of English. In translating from English to Romanian, a special problem is presented by the pronoun "you," which in Romanian can take…

The traditional method of teaching writing to students in universities by correcting their errors supposes a generally well-developed sense of written language structure and formal English language discourse. The new population seeking higher education does not always possess such a background. An alternative instructional method is to use the…

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. This paper represents the beginning of a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrates on comparing the syntax used by ten…