Using methods developed in transformational generative grammar, three types of nominal constructions in Spanish are treated in this paper: Fact nominalizations ("[El] Escribir es agradable"), Manner nominalizations ("El tocar [de la mujer] es agradable"), and Abstract noun nominalizations ("La construccion rapida de esta escuela es dudosa"). While…

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun-noun compounds. Results indicate that semantic relationships that hold between members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of appropriate compounding relationships. (CHK)

The class of English words traditionally called adverbs is examined and redefined in this paper. The following three subclasses of adverbs are identified: limiters, which are words that modify noun phrases; intensifiers, which are words that modify adjectives; and "true" adverbs, which modify verb phrases and sentences. Examples of these…

This study attempts to bring together most of the information about the transformational analysis of the grammar of English that was available up through the summer of 1968, and to integrate it into a single coherent format. The format chosen is that of C. Fillmore (the "Deep Case" hypothesis) combined with the "Lexicalist" hypothesis of N.…

The author raises the question of how to relate modern transformational grammars to a body of empirical fact, and suggests why paraphrasing might legitimately be considered a feature of behavior relevant to linguistic competence. This study is introduced by a discussion of the empirical basis of descriptive linguistics, followed by sections…

A report on a study in progress of the acquisition of a syntax rule: inversion in questions beginning with "Wh..". Its purpose is to show how certain modifications of linguistic theory and practice can contribute to this study and to psychology of language in general. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Reports an experiment intended to assess the psychological reality of the underlying clauses in "resultative constructions" in English. (RM)

Reports research at the University of Saskatchewan in which experiments with variously rearranged English and French sentences showed grammatical acceptability decreasing as the disruption of the sentence producing field of subject, verb, object, qualifier increased. (RM)

This volume of working papers includes two papers concerned with syntactic analysis in English. The first paper deals with a number of problems that arise in conjunction with the necessary, allowed, or disallowed coreferentiality of a complement sentence subject with some noun-phrase in a higher sentence. The author seeks to prove that the…

Before beginning the Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, it was necessary to determine whether to base the analysis on a corpus or on native intuitions. It seemed that the best method would combine the theoretical and the empirical. A translation method based on a corpus of text was adopted. The Brown University "Standard Sample of…

Discusses the possessive constructions in English, in particular, the postponed construction. (An example of the postponed construction is "a book of John's," contrasted with "John's book," the preposed construction.) The study contrasts the possessive "of" with the "of" in other constructions and concludes…

A number of grammatical transformations are studied which often, but not always, involve the movement of constituents. Data from English, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Thai are investigated in an attempt to discover a principle (of potentially universal scope) that governs certain constraints that must be imposed on these…

Some of the major studies by the proponents of the Derivational Theory of Complexity are reviewed in this paper, and the results of a study to determine the adequacy of the theory as an account of message processing difficulty are included. The subjects for the study were students selected from five sections of the introductory communication class…