It is asserted that the treatment of intonation within the framework of generative grammar has not shown whether surface syntactic structure is sufficient for formulation of phonological rules. An attempt is made to demonstrate that within English phonology reference to deep structure is necessary. (Available from: See FL 508 214). (RM)

This is an outline of the major characteristics of sentences like "Ali alikuwa mwalimu" (Ali was a teacher), "Ali ni mwalimu" (Ali is a teacher), and the numerous pattern variations demonstrated by such sentences. Constructions of this kind are traditionally called copula constructions, and have been classified in terms of (1)…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

This paper seeks to discover the rules active in the formation of tags (intonation tags, declarative tags, and tag questions) in English. The author discusses former analyses of these constructions and presents his own thoughts with many examples, concluding that English has at least two tag formation rules: one that accounts (perhaps…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…

An extreme view of language acquisition sees base structures as innate, and acquisition of the grammar of a particular language as a process of learning the transformation rules needed to get from base structures to surface structures of adult native speakers. Base structures are understood to most resemble simple-active-affirmative-declarative…

The author finds Katz and Postal's 1964 generative semantic theories concerning the organization of grammar incorrect and proposes an interpretive approach to semantics in which syntactic structures are given interpretations by an autonomous semantic component. The research reported leads the author to describe a generative grammar consisting of…

This document contains three reports in prepublication form on research conducted by linguists at the University of Colorado. The first paper presents an argument against the theories concerning the concept of the distributional syllable. Such theories are based on the assumptions that the syllable can and should be defined formally, without…