An essential task for the morphosyntactic level within the grammatical component of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is the handling of constituent ordering. This area of grammar, which is known as positional syntax, constitutes the subject of the present paper, in which the ordering of constituents is examined within the framework of a dynamic…

The aim of this paper is to challenge the generally accepted claim in descriptive and theoretical linguistics that English anaphoric proforms replace constituents (semantic or syntactic units) in underlying representation. On the basis of authentic examples, it is shown that the anaphoric use of the predicative proforms "one" and "do so", the…

Studies on complementation in English and other languages have traditionally focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different complement types. As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of different complements. This paper investigates the semantics of complementation within the…

Drawing on naturally-occurring data extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA) in conjunction with data elicited from native speakers by means of questionnaires, this paper provides a bottom-up, usage-based analysis of instances of depictive secondary predicates involving mainly verba…

A framework is provided for the description and contrastive analysis of limited-domain syntactic choice in English and French. Using a corpus of naturally occurring English and French sets of instructional texts, the expressions available in each language for conveying the two procedural semantic relations of "generation" and "enablement" are…

Previous studies have shown a correlation between working memory (WM) and syntactic complexity (variously defined) in language comprehension. The present study investigates this relationship in spontaneous language production, proposing a novel metric, informed by language development and disorders, where complexity is construed in terms of those…

Revised version of a paper presented at the 11th International Congress of Linguists, Bologna, Italy, 1972. (DD)

An investigation looks at complex English sentences that are used to represent two ordered events and containing "before" or "after" subordinate clauses. It is concluded that text evidence is directly relevant to an understanding of language processing. (25 references) (Author/VWL)

Looks at two languages, one well known and the other less so, that have undergone changes in word order. Data for the two languages in question--English and Irish--are compared. Parallels in the internal mechanisms suggested for the attested word order changes in both Old English and Old Irish are examined critically. (Author/VWL)

Based on research carried out under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Revised version of a paper presented at a meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Washington, D.C. in December 1970. (DS)

Focuses on the language of civil engineering as manifested in the professional journal "Civil Engineering ASCE." Articles are analyzed, both syntactically and lexically, in terms of three major rhetorical functions: description, prescription, and persuasion. (17 references) (GLR)

Object deletion in Classical Arabic is semantically marked on two levels: ( 1) dropping the object deliberately but functionally; and (2) emptying the object slot and focusing on the verbal action. The second level of object deletion stresses the verbal action. (20 references) (GLR)

Outlines some of the principle structural changes that have occurred in the Norman French dialect, spoken on the Isle of Jersey, as the result of contact with English. (18 references) (GLR)

Reports research at the University of Saskatchewan in which experiments with variously rearranged English and French sentences showed grammatical acceptability decreasing as the disruption of the sentence producing field of subject, verb, object, qualifier increased. (RM)