This study was designed to examine complexity of maternal language to 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old male and female infants in a laboratory situation as measured by mean length of utternace (MLU), frequencies of certain sentence types, and other syntactic indices. Subjects were 36 mothers and their infants. There were six male and six female infants at…

The third volume in this series contains nine articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "Composition in Serbo-Croatian and English," by Zeljko Bujas; "The English Present Perfect Tense and Its Serbo-Croatian Equivalents," by Maja Dubravcic; "Linking Be+Predicative…

The fifth volume of this series contains ten articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "On the Word Order of Subject and Predicate in English and Serbo-Croatian from the Point of View of Functional Sentence Perspective," by Ljiljana Bibovic; "The English Personal Pronouns and Their…

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains five articles. They are: "On Contrastive Contrastive Grammar," by Eric P. Hamp; "Remarks on Contrastive Analysis and Translation," by Vladimir Ivir; "Formal and Semantic Considerations in Contrastive Analysis," by Jerry L. Liston; "On Differences in…

To study the development of syntax in the language of deaf students, the Test of Syntactic Ability was constructed and administered to approximately 450 deaf students (10-18 years old) and 60 normal children (8-10 years old). The test contained 22 subtests covering seven major syntactic structures: relativization, conjunction, complementation,…

The present paper reports on an experiment designed to test the semantic analysis of Spanish mood vs. the traditional analysis in terms of government, by testing preferences for the Present Indicative or the Present Subjunctive following expressions of varying certainty. Two separate tests were conducted, in which subjects were given the option of…

The topic of black dialect, a timely concern in education and society, should include an understanding of the relationship between language and culture and an understanding of the differences within ethnic and environmental influences contributing to linguistic diversity. Characteristics in black dialect which reflect its descent from African…

Four realizations of the copula occur in English, two in both Anglo and Black English and two in Black English and in some varieties of Anglo English but not in standard English. This paper describes the use of the copula in English and identifies the phonological, syntactic, and semantic factors which are believed to condition its realization in…

This book is an introduction to linguistics, written for the beginning student. Among the topics explored are speculations about the origins of language, its nature, how it grows, and how it changes. Other topics include what is essential in the structure of language, the similarities and differences among languages, how the varying patterns of…

Using second grade children, this study was designed to investigate the differences (or lack of differences) among the Interview, the Picture Stimulus Interview, and the Free Play Situation techniques in the categories of productivity, thought groups, compound structures, complex structures, and words per thought group as a means of gaining a…

This paper deals with the counterexamples to the general principles that: (1) a sentence as utterance has only one illocutionary force, in the sense of J.L. Austin; and (2) performative verbs do not normally retain illocutionary force in embedded contexts. Various tests for illocutionary force are applied, such as substitution of another speech…

This article discusses the ordering of semantic units such as nouns and verbs in Chinese sentences, with references to problems encountered by students of Chinese. (CLK)

Based on Mulder's previous classification of all semiotic systems designed to describe the system of discrete features in human languages, this article explores a further subclassification of the genus language into species. (CLK)

Endel Tulving's distinction between "episodic" and "semantic" memory defines age differences in word association norms more comprehensively than the usual syntactic classifications. As subjects mature the principal development is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily with the stimulus' perceived…

Verb patterns are arranged into the five following groups: Intransitive, intensive, monotransitive, ditransitive, and complex transitive. Each type is explained and illustrated. (CHK)