Seven objective measures of language production--number of words, T-units, subordinate clauses, clauses of all types, words per clause, words per T-unit, and clauses per T-unit--were applied to 269 compositions written by seventh, ninth, and 11th graders to test assumptions about the relationships between quality of writing and students' age and…

This monograph reports a longitudinal study of the language development of 211 pupils as they progressed from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Data include transcribed interviews, written compositions, reading and IQ scores, listening scores and ratings, teachers' ratings on specified language factors, and reports of books read. Results…

This paper argues: (1) that one of the major syntactic constraints adopted by many proponents of the Extended Standard Theory, namely the Specified Subject Condition (SSC), is empirically inadequate with respect to "unbounded" extraction phenomena; and (2) that the unbounded extraction data which the SSC purported to account for need to be…

TO DISPEL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH TEACHERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED BY THE LINGUIST. THE LINGUIST SEES LANGUAGE AS "A SYSTEM OF PATTERNED VOCAL BEHAVIOR BY MEANS OF WHICH MEN COOPERATE IN SOCIETY." BY USING RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC METHODS, HE STUDIES REPRESENTATIVE AND AUTHENTIC…

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

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…

Samples of written language were collected from 140 congenitally deaf children at grade levels 3, 5, 7, and 9. The samples were then subjected to error, quantitative, and transformational analysis. Findings suggested a relationship between the order in which the deaf child acquires the rules of his language and the ordering of rules in a…

The developmental patterns of written and oral syntax were investigated in a group of fourth, sixth, and eighth grade Omaha Indian children living in semipoverty in a rural reservation community. These findings were then compared with the findings of a similar study dealing with white children living in a different cultural, socioeconomic, and…

This volume presents a study of the clause as a verb-centered construction surrounded by certain nuclear constituents which serve to subcategorize it. Five India-Nepal languages are examined: Kotia Oriya, Kupia, and Maithili (Indo-Aryan family); and Dhanghar-Kurux and Kolani (Dravidian family). Dhangar-Kurux and Maithili are spoken in Nepal, the…

This paper deals with problems concerning the nature of the input to a phonetic processor. Several assumptions provide the basis for consideration of the problem. There is a phonological level of processing which reflects the sound structure of the language; the rules associated with it are not affected by variables associated either with the…

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

The process of embedding, a term used in generative grammar to refer to a construction in which a sentence is included within another sentence, is examined as it occurs in Yoruba literature. Examples are drawn from Yoruba praise poetry, in both written and oral form and within Yoruba novels. Forms of embedding identified include those to draw…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…

The relationship between first-grade reading achievement and selected experimental language measures was investigated. The measures selected for study were (1) number of T-units (communication units) spoken in an experimental situation, (2) mean length of T-unit, (3) ratio of subordinate clause length to T-unit length, (4) ratio of…

The first volume of this series is divided into reports, studies, and preliminary results of work in progress. All were presented at a meeting on contrastive linguistics held in Romania. The project is intended to reveal the specificity of the structures and systems of Romanian and English with a view to comparing them and, on that basis,…