Linguists have classified analysis of the "ba" construction into three approaches: structural, semantic and communicative. This paper outlines treatment of "ba" in several major Chinese textbooks and suggests an approach to teaching the construction. Students must be taught linguistic information in logical steps for best command of the language.…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

This article examines speakers' perceptions of and attitudes towards address pronoun usage in Paris and Toulouse. The data on which this article is based come from a comparative project based at the University of Melbourne, "Address in some western European languages, and were generated in focus groups in both Paris and Toulouse, as well as…

A statistical analysis of 3,170 entries in the Kotelova and Sorokin dictionary "Novyje slova i znacenija: slovar'-spravocnik po materialam pressy i literatury 60-x godov," Moscow, 1973 and the Stejnfel'dt dictionary "Castotnyj slovar' sovremennogo Russkogo Literaturnogo Jazyka," Moscow, n.d. establishes a clear-cut correlation between the new…

How does the lack of articles in Russian influence the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses? The problem is discussed in comparison with German. Russian disposes only of facultative, but nonambiguous instruments. Certain determiners allow a precise differentiation between two kinds of relative clauses. (Text is in…

This paper concerns the factors underlying the selection of German prepositions in certain environments. It aims first to make such information available to students of German to aid in understanding use of prepositions, and second, to form a theoretical basis for the semantics of prepositions. (CHK)

Examines and analyzes occurrences of the English prepositions "at, "to, "on, and "in. Concludes that these prepositions are logically connected and their functions and meanings are comprehensible from the psycho-physiological experiences of man in space. (DS)

Three experiments were conducted to ascertain the effect of contextual restraints on pronoun assignment. Pronoun selection is based on integration of the context even where it is already syntactically constrained. Integration occurs during and not following the assignment of the pronoun. (PMJ)

This paper examines the two markers of Mandarin Chinese, "-guo" and "-le," and focuses primarily on areas of difficulty that the non-native speaker may encounter due to confusion of these markers. (CHK)

To test to what extent children are aware of the differences between closed-class and open-class words, 104 children aged 3 to 5 years participated in a sentence repetition task. Children were more likely to repeat sentences correctly when the nonsense words functioned in open-class rather than in closed-class contexts. (Contains 20 references.)…

This article examines the use and choice of address pronouns among Finnish and Finland-Swedish students in various situations. The study is based on a questionnaire on address usage distributed to university students in the city of Vaasa in Finland. The aim of the study is to investigate potential differences between the use of T and V in Finnish…