This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of…

A study of Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria, focuses on the system of constraints governing tonal processes. Specifically, it examines the ways in which general processes of low tone raising and high tone lowering are realized in domains constructed by verbs and by preverbal auxiliary and adverbial constituents. Sequentially…

A study of middle verb constructions in Canadian French and Madrid Spanish suggests that two alleged defining characteristics of these constructions are not really defining characteristics. These are: (1) that the constructions only appear in generic sentences, and (2) that they disallow "by"-phrases of the type found in passive…

This Lao language textbook is the second draft of a book developed for teaching Lao to United States Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) and is designed to be used with a Lao language instructor familiar with competency based curricula. It is not designed for self-instruction, although after some hours of use, students may be familiar enough with the…

this study, an analysis of poetry in Tina Sambal, a Philippine language spoken by about 70,000 persons in northern Zambales province, looks at the characteristics of the different poetic genres and poetic conventions followed in writing songs and poems. Primary emphasis is on phonological restrictions, grammatical liberties, and semantic…

Analysis of the basic and alternative word order patterns of spoken and written modern Breton confirms it as a consistent VSO (verb, subject, object) language, possessing the principal operator/operand features posited for such languages, rather than having predominantly SVO word order as some recent research has suggested. However, as most…

Writing problems common among many college students are "phrasal" errors such as limited vocabulary, inability to distinguish standard usage from slang or jargon, a tendency to frame thoughts in cliches, a peppering of meaningless intensifiers, and a gift for redundancy and wordiness. To help correct these problems, a text-checking system called…

Developmental trends in the effects of expectations regarding agent/action matches on judgments of sentence acceptability were investigated. Five sentences reflected expected relations ("harmonious") and five contradicted them ("contrary"). Twelve subjects each were in grades 4 through 8 during year 1; the same 60 subjects…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ANALYSIS WAS TO DISCOVER CERTAIN ASPECTS OF STYLE (BOTH LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL) WHICH COULD BE COUNTED AND WHICH WOULD, WHEN COMPARED, DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN THE WRITTEN PROSE OF TWO AUTHORS. THE SUBJECT SELECTED FOR ANALYSIS WAS "THE O'RUDDY," BEGUN BY STEPHEN CRANE AND COMPLETED BY ROBERT BARR. SINCE THERE WAS NO…

Discursive functions are seldom expressed in an absolutely neutral way. In most cases, various colorings - expressive, affective or social - are superimposed on the utterance by which a function is conveyed. In so far as these colorings are not random shades, but can be regarded as graded nuances within given ranges, selected in order to fit the…

In speaking a child sometimes makes constructions in which a sequence of separate utterances expresses a semantic relation not expressed by either utterance. These "vertical constructions" are the main point of this study. Previous studies of construction in child language have largely dealt with sentences. In this study, sentences are…

The paper constitutes an attempt to provide a nonenumerative characterization of agreeing terms and agreement features. The following pertinent statements turn out to be (near) exceptionless: only coreferential terms agree, and for any given language all agreement features are pronominal ones. Four agreement features, gender, number, definiteness,…

In answer to the need for more effective punctuation instruction, a project, based on the theory that an essential relationship exists between intonation and punctuation, was designed for and executed with two 9th-grade student groups--one experimental, the other control. The experimental group received punctuation instruction through the use of…

Differences between the English and Ukrainian verbal forms, meaning, and usage are studied in this booklet. While the author illustrates significant distinctions in basic forms, sentences, and in paragraph structure, he concludes that the most important differences between both systems are of a psychological nature. Examples are cited, often using…