THE PROBLEM OF THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE STRUCTURE IS CONSIDERED AND THE FORM WHICH ANY LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTION SHOULD TAKE. THE AUTHOR EXAMINES THE INFLUENCE OF THE SWISS LINGUIST, FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS. THE QUESTION OF "MENTALISM" IN LINGUISTICS IS REDUCED TO THE PROBLEM OF WHETHER LINGUISTIC…

Urges that a distinction between "grammatical knowledge" and "grammatical description" be maintained in every aspect of language instruction and in preparation of instructional materials. (RL)

THE DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE DETERMINERS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO MODIFYING CLAUSE STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH AND MANDARIN CHINESE ARE STUDIED WITHIN THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR, AS PRESENTED BY KATZ AND POSTAL. A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE FORM-CLASS AND EARLIER TRANSFORMATIONAL APPROACHES TO THE PROBLEM IS MADE WITH THE CONCLUSION…

A discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs in Russian leads to the conclusion that the question of transitivity rests primarily with the meaning of the verb itself and with the resulting amenability to passive transformation. (Author/RM)

Argues that verbal prefixes in Hungarian should not be assigned to a specific category of their own, but should be analyzed as belonging to the category of postpositions. (Author/AM)

Shorter version of this paper read at the First California Linguistics Conference, Berkeley, May 1971. (VM)

IN ANALYZING WAYS BY WHICH VARIOUS LANGUAGES SIGNAL THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF ELEMENTS IN A SENTENCE, ONE APPROACH (THAT OF TRANSFORMATION THEORY) IS TO RELATE EMPHASIS TO A TOPIC-COMMENT RELATIONSHIP. A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SEVERAL ENGLISH, TURKISH, AND JAPANESE SENTENCES THAT TAKE DIFFERENT PATTERNS OF EMPHASIS SUGGESTS THAT IN EACH CASE THE…

A preliminary study of the syntactic characteristics of the imperative construction in modern Chinese is presented. The term "imperative" is used to refer to the type of syntactic construction which is marked by an implicit or explicit second person subject, and which expresses a direct command. Indirect or implied commands expressed by a…

An analysis of the causative verb construction in French as studied by Harris. Some questions raised are: Can a causative verb be considered an auxiliary? Which verbs can be causative? Might the notion of auxiliary include "auxiliary nouns"? Syntactic and lexical-semantic distinctions are made. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

Contradicts Pablo Jordan's theory that certain "se" constructions in Spanish are neither passive nor reflexive. It is claimed that syntactic evidence reveals two types of impersonal structures, the impersonal active and the passive reflexive. (Text is in Spanish.) (CK)