Fieldwork with a Hydaburg resident yielded this descriptive paper, which focuses on Haida syntax, and especially predication. The verbal word in Haida is of three distinct types--active, stative, and neutral--the first two of which may occur in either SOV or OSV word order. Neutral verbal words are relatively rare and take active pronouns plus a…

The paper proposes, on the basis of a study of relative clauses and WH-interrogative constructions, to reflect the time-oriented character of the sentence by replacing neutral expressions like "#" with explicit time references like "beginning" and "end." These boundaries are to be universally associated with all…

The theory that reduction transformations provide speakers with the option of deleting redundant information when communicating to a topic-cognizant audience is supported. In the experiment, college physiology students were provided with deep structure proximal sentences (base propositions), and asked to communicate them to different audiences,…

Presents checklists of the more common grammatical patterns in spoken Mandarin for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. Most of the patterns include an example with an English gloss. (Author/LMO)

Revised version of a paper supported by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. The universal base hypothesis states that all natural languages utilize the same base component in their transformational grammars. (DD)

Recognition criteria refer to those features which enable the analyst to recognize the item he attempts to ascertain through his elicitation procedure. (DD)

Presents a theory of reading and a justification in the form of a defense of a highly generalized approach to the different forms of reading and of a lexical approach to receptive grammar. The article also addresses the question of the usefulness of models in general and this one in particular, specifically with relation to foreign-language…

It is argued that anglicisms in Canadian French cover a much broader spectrum than in any European variety of French, with traits of the English language incorporated into spelling, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phraseology. A typology of these features is proposed, with examples. (Author/MSE)

Two experiments examined the process of acquisition of sentence structure in the passive voice among young children. The subjects were several hundred monolingual French-speaking children aged 4-11 in schools in Liege, Belgium. The two experiments used different subject groups. In the first experiment, the children were required to interpret…

Compilation of a list of the most common phrases used in reading was begun with the rationale that the quick recognition of phrases would facilitate reading comprehension. These first efforts showed that categorizing phrases by parts of speech did not provide acceptable levels of accuracy. The system that was effective, however, used a computer…

In Onondaga and all northern Iroquoian languages, nouns can be incorporated into verbs. The function of this is semantic as well as syntactic. It is semantic in that the sense of an incorporated noun will be narrower than its unincorporated counterpart regardless of modifiers. Incorporation changes the transformational structure of the sentence.…

The properties of "do", its distribution and meaning, are discussed. "Do" is one of the most common error-zones for Indian learners of English. Two analyses of "do" which account for the distribution and meaning of this element are presented. According to the transformational approach, "do" is introduced in…

A set of procedures for testing hypotheses about the syntactic structure of natural languages has been developed for use on-line with computer display consoles. The procedures were designed in the context of Chomsky's transformational generative grammar. A linguist can construct phrase structure trees, selecting with the lightgun from alternative…