The existence of a "literary dialect" was postulated on several grounds, and specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. (HOD)

Analysis of French-spoken constructions in which the superlative begins the utterance, rather than occurring within the sentence, suggests that instead of being variants of standard usage, these constructions leave substantial room for interpretation of syntactic relationships. (Author/MSE)

A longitudinal study examined two-year-olds' acquisition of the English auxiliary system after a six-week exposure to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Results indicated that subjects did not significantly differ from a baseline group that did not receive additional input. (Author/CB)

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

Analyzes functional linguistic variables (sentence beginnings, frequency of verb types, material between subject and verb, end-sentence cohesion patterns) in hard news and human interest stories in "The Houston Post." Results supported functional theories about word order. Proportions of verb types in news stories differed from those in…

The major targets of number agreement in English are pronouns and verbs. To examine the factors that control pronoun number and to test pronouns against a psycholinguistic account of how verb number arises during language production, we varied the meaningful and grammatical number properties of agreement controllers and examined the impact of…

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with…