Divides Taiwanese modals into: (1) authority, where a deep structure agent exercises authority; (2) contigency, which concerns the speaker's judgment of the possibility or logical necessity df the occurrence of an event; and (3) volition, which expresses the subject's desires. The constructions in which these modals appear are examined. (PJM)

Compares two analyses of a verb phrase deletion in a particular English sentence with a third analysis and shows that the analysis that takes the word "would" in the sentence as a proform has significant advantages over the analysis that posits a deletion site after "would." (SED)

The linguistic complexity of humor is illustrated with examples of word play translated from French to English and English to French. Examples from the writings of James Joyce and Marcel Proust are highlighted. (CB)

It is proposed that LF-movement in in-situ questions is not adequate to express the scope distinctions basic to the semantic interpretations of the direct and indirect question dichotomy in Marathi and Kashmiri, because this question type is more constrained in these languages than in languages like Chinese and Japanese. This theory is illustrated…

Discusses the use of prepositional phrases as subjects and objects through consideration and analysis of: (1) characteristics of such phrases; (2) category status of prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions; and (3) sentences containing prepositional phrases in typical noun phrase positions. (CB)

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

Certain word-order patterns are more basic and less marked than others. The more strongly marked a pattern seems to be in isolation, the stronger must be the contextual forces motivating its use, if it is to seem natural in a text. Various topicalizations (of adverbials, objects, and parts of verb phrases, for example) need various degrees of…

Fifty-five structures of the Chinese language are described and their particular usage patterns are discussed for the use of teachers, linguists, and advanced students of Chinese. Each structure is listed by its major structural element(s), its grammatical element(s), or a combination of the two. The examination of each structure consists of an…

The encoding of Swedish syntactic information in a study of linguistic data processing is described in detail. The choice of syntactic variables and classification criteria, illustrated with examples, is also discussed. In addition, uses of the coding for contrasting languages, as in this study's comparison of Swedish, Finnish, and English word…

The parameter-setting model of universal grammar provides a basis for integrating two theories of second language acquisition: contrastive analysis and creative construction. The elicited responses of adult native speakers of Spanish and adult native speakers of Japanese were examined. The head-initial/head-final parameter was the principle…