To determine whether poor readers employ less efficient strategies in processing logical connectives than do good readers, 34 ninth grade students participated in a study. Half of the students were good readers and half were poor readers. An acquisition list consisting of 18 target sentences and 6 fillers was constructed. A list of 42 recognition…

Constraining linguistic metatheory by demanding that it allow the construction of grammars for all the frequently occurring idiolects of standard American English is shown to narrow the choices among competing theoretical positions. In this way data from a nonhomogeneous speech community are used to illuminate rather than cloud a theoretical…

The syntactic relationship between the quantifier and the noun phrase (NP) and the function of the quantifier in the sentence are studied. In the first part of the paper, the theories of several linguists concerning the structure of the NP that includes a quantifier are reviewed. In parts 2 and 3 a syntactic description of the quantifier is…

This essay discusses a theory of grammar which incorporated Chomsky's distinction between deep and surface structure and accepts Fillmore's proposal to exclude such subject and concepts as direct object from the base structure. While recognizing the need for specifying an underlying set of caselike relations, it is proposed that this need can best…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

The author considers the rule of negative transportation in English and discusses his ideas about such a rule in contrast to the theories set forth by Robin Lakoff. The rule of negative transportation allows the shifting of a negative, under certain conditions, from a lower clause into a higher one. The discussion centers around the occurrence of…

Proposes a reexamination of the ellipsis within the framework of discourse grammar, as opposed to a grammar of sentence structure. (AM)

Grammatical theories that rely exclusively on the categorical nature of constituents to determine their syntactic behavior encounter problems when dealing with cleft construction. The ungrammaticality of such constructions is indeed syntactic in nature and can be shown to derive from a general principle of universal grammar (UG), restricting the…

This paper is concerned with the treatment of anaphoric phenomena in a semantically based transformation grammar. It is argued that account of anaphora in terms of coreference are no better than accounts in terms of identical NPs; instead, it is proposed that a unified account of anaphora, which covers both quantified and unquantified NPs, may be…

This article describes phonological and semantic characteristics associated with the surface structure of some Japanese sentence intonations. The aim of the long-term study is to show the place of intonation in the total system of Japanese grammar. This particular part of the study is limited to the group of intonations which are characterized by…

Data on the complexity of relative clause formation in children indicate that right embedding precedes central embedding in development. Previous research on the subject argues that configurations where coreferential NP's function as subjects are less complex than configurations where coreferential NP's function as objects. It appears that the…

This dissertation examines relative clauses in Spanish. The introduction compares various characteristics of Spanish and English relative clauses, while chapter 1 contrasts restrictive and appositive relative clauses. The question of which relative forms should be generated by the grammar in both types of clauses is considered. Chapter 2 handles…

This paper examines the various syntactic and semantic functions of the "ada" verb of "being" in Malay. The claim is made that there is an abstract uppermost "ada" in the underlying structure of Malay sentences that asserts or denies the truth of the surface main clause. A further claim is made that the…

This paper focuses on linguistic prosodic units related to boundaries between syntactic units. Specifically, rules for predicting the location of such boundaries, and factors affecting their location, are discussed. Examples are given on how prosodies can be used for syntactic analysis. Addressing the question of prosodic units and their…

It is possible to apply the concept of surface-structure constraint to a particular area of Hungarian syntax. A surface-structure constraint, according to David Perlmutter, can be seen as a template which serves as a filter at some level after the transformational component. In the case of Hungarian cooccurrence of noun phrases and verbs in a…