This study examined the extent of children's awareness of the semantic subtleties of the word "promise" and their comprehension of sentences following an atypical syntactic pattern using "promise" as the main verb. Subjects included children within three months of being six-and-one-half, eight-and-one-half, nine-and-one-half, and ten-and-one-half…

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are…

The effects of reading to children on the development and production of certain morphological structures are examined in a sample of 20 children, two to seven years old, in matched experimental and control groups. Both groups were pre- and posttested with an adapted form of Berko's nonsense-word test. The experimental group was individually read a…

This article discusses the nature of the syntactic-autonomy in French, that is, the absence of a correlation between the position of an element in a sequence of discourse and its relative function. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Intends to demonstrate the value of statistical analysis in linguistic inquiry through a specific problem, mainly the distribution of and the correlation between the perfect and imperfect subjunctive in Latin. (AM)

Data in this study showed significant linguistic differences between six- and seven-year-olds and a leveling-off between the seven- and eight-year-olds. (DD)

Found that older students speak in a more mature manner than younger ones when presented with paraphrasing tasks. (DD)

The nature of the task of defining words by means of other words and the development of language responses (from children aged four to seven) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. (Author/RM)

To ensure reliable language data for research there is a need for experiments eliciting acceptability judgments. Experimental data are discussed to show that evaluation of a sentence may be affected by the sentence with which it is paired. Sentences with similar deviances should be presented as a set for evaluation. (CHK)

Discusses research which suggests that language learning occurs by learning the regularities inherent in the semantic system and not by learning any regularities present in the syntax system. (EKN)

Investigated the hypotheses that language-impaired children produce fewer logical propositions per utterance and evidence less control of formal syntactic markers. Matched for mean length of utterance, language samples from 10 language-impaired children approximately five years of age and 10 normal children about three years of age were analyzed.…

Examines some of the early uses of instrumental nouns unaccompanied by prepositions and considers the various meanings they conveyed, in order to show the kinds of changes they have undergone. A number of nominal forms have been adverbialized, and some have been replaced by prepositional phrases or other grammatical constructions. (SL)

The textbook is designed as a self-contained introduction to English syntax, providing an overview of key theoretical concepts and descriptive devices used in contemporary linguistic work rather than a historical perspective and using varieties of English from around the world rather than other languages for illustration. Chapter topics include:…

Research done while the first author was on a Science Scholarship from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC); research also supported by an NRC grant to the second author; forms part of Shannon Moeser's doctoral thesis submitted to McGill University. (VM)

Compilation supported by the National Science Foundation. (VM)