Two experiments measured the frequency of perceptual errors as a function of differential presupposition in descriptive sentences. More errors occurred when misrepresentation involved presupposition than when it involved the focused proposition. Several surface structures of English, in combination, increased the presuppositional strength of the…

Why Not V?'' refers to the grammatical structure Why Not (plus) Verb?'' (RS)

Investigation supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

It is frequently observed that modern English has a fixed word order. Therefore, the English speaker is locked inside a syntactic system which leaves him few expressional options. The author disagrees and suggests that because of options of word order, the English speaker can impose his own level of meaning on his utterances. (Author/RR)

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)

Expanded version of a paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, St. Louis, Missouri, December 28, 1971; research supported by a grant from the Graduate School, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. (DD)

Proposes an approach to contrastive linguistics which takes into account syntax and semantics, and discusses the role of such an approach in explaining surface structure differences between English and Chinese sentences of the type: "He is a good pianist" and "I have a bad knee." (AM)

An argument is made for a theory of deep structure which does not neglect surface structure analysis. See FL 508 197 for availability. (RM)

This article discusses the notion of the scope of quantifiers in natural language. Previous studies are reviewed, and three factors essential to understanding scope are isolated: inherent characteristics of the quantifier, its grammatical function in a sentence, and serial distribution of predominance. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Work supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to Harvard University and by the Language Research Foundation. Considers the properties and use of the word even'' in English. (VM)