This report deals with advances in linguistic analysis and programing. The theoretical theses for this work were presented in the first annual report. This second report concentrates on progress in the descriptive analysis of German and English, and on computer programs which have been developed during the year. Linguistic work during the period…

This paper discusses the term "ergative" and traces the history of this and related terms and concepts in descriptive linguistics. Early attempts at defining the ergative illustrate the preoccupation with its supposedly passive nature. Other questions include the simple identification of the ergative, co-occurring cases, supposed…

Slightly revised version of a lecture ( Zur grammatischen Beschreibung kommunikativer Elemente in Sprechakten'' Y On Grammatical Description of Communicative Elements in Speech''I) presented in Saarbrucken, West Germany, November 10, 1972. (DD)

Speech given February 10, 1970, at the Hessisches Lehrerfortbildungswerk," Reinhardswaldschule. (DS)

Presents a fine-grained analysis of extensive empirical data on the automatization of explicitly learned rules of morphosyntax in a second language. Results indicate that the learning of morphosyntactic rules is highly skill-specific and that these skills develop gradually over time, adhering to the same power function learning curve as the…

Reviews some history of how lexical representations have acquired an important role in sentence processing research. Discusses relevant issues, including the importance of timecourse information in theorizing; the importance of frequency information in theories of sentence processing; and the question of the grain of frequency information. (42…

The positional definition of Hausa noun and verb, which uses person and aspect markers "y, s, and t" as criteria, is criticized as an unreliable framework for identification of nouns and verbs. It is proposed that this is so for nouns because a word may appear as a noun without any of the three markers. Verbs are more central than the…

A study of Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria, focuses on the system of constraints governing tonal processes. Specifically, it examines the ways in which general processes of low tone raising and high tone lowering are realized in domains constructed by verbs and by preverbal auxiliary and adverbial constituents. Sequentially…

The typology of VSO (verb-subject-object) languages cannot be explained in terms of the syntactic theory (Government and Binding theory) that governs the more common SVO languages. It is considered that VSO languages might be derived from underlying SVO structure. This idea, known as the SVO Hypothesis, is presented as a paradigm to which examples…

A doctoral dissertation on general clitic theory and Finnish particle clitics in particular looks at the mixed linguistic status of clitics and proposes that they are not as mysterious as reported, but should be viewed either as bound words (bound lexemes) or phrasal affixes. An initial chapter introduces the Finnish particle clitics and their…

This guide presents a system for determining the qender of French nouns that has been tested against 12,000 pages of general reading: novels, history, social science, law, finance, and the Bible. The guide discusses the rules for determining gender and also presents various lists of the non-routine or exceptions to the rules. It is asserted that…

The course in parsing English is essentially a survey and comparison of several of the principal systems used for understanding natural language. The basic procedure of parsing is described. The discussion of the principal systems is based on the idea that "meaning is procedures," that is, that the procedures of application give a parsed…

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

This study presents the first descriptive analysis of the structure of Sa'i:di, the variety of Egyptian Arabic spoken by the inhabitants of the Nile Valley between Cairo and Aswan. It is hoped that this study, designed to describe the phonemics, morphemics, and syntax of Sa'i:di, will contribute to dialect studies of the varieties of Arabic spoken…

The material presented in this workbook, which is in preliminary form under revision, has been designed to introduce the basic aspects of the morphology and syntax of literary Arabic. It is intended to be used with and as a continuation of "The Phonology and Script of Literary Arabic," by the same authors. (See ED 012 912.) These two…