In technical texts, verbal nouns are frequent, expressing phenomena, processes and procedures. With these occur "replacement" verbs, which serve as the verb of the clause. These may form free associations or firm combinations, as is shown in word lists. This difference must be reflected in the design of exercises. (Text is in German.)…

This study examined the factors influencing the choice of the conjunctions "and" or "but" in joining two clauses of a compound sentence. Subjects were students at first-, fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade and adult levels. (Author/ED)

If college freshmen know something about syntax, have practiced combining and breaking down sentences, and have learned to think in terms of deep structures and surface structures, they may be better able to understand and relieve the discomfort caused by a garbled key sentence structure. Grammar instruction in freshman composition provides a…

A reaction-time experiment measured the time that subjects needed to read and comprehend a series of sentences, the syntactic form of which was systematically varied. The focus was on the effect of syntactic structure on processing time, reflected in reaction time in a neutral context, and the effect of prior context on time needed to process a…

Two studies were conducted to test Francis Christensen's theory of generative rhetoric, which maintains that students should be taught the types of sentences that they infrequently use, especially ones with nonrestrictive phrasal modifiers (participial phrases and appositives) as a way to approach invention. The first study examined the principles…

Predictors of relative clause production in adult second language acquisition were examined through a replication and extension of a study by Schachter (1974). The present study is different in that it was based on oral instead of written production and it was designed to examine avoidance with the consideration that avoidance presupposed choice.…

High school students in Quebec city were tested for their ability to choose Standard French as opposed to Anglicized modes of expression. Lexical, syntagmatic, and phrase Anglicisms were covered. Both direct lexical borrowings from English and translations of idiomatic English terms were included. Students were divided into categories according to…

AN INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING LANGUAGE MATURITY SHOULD BE EASILY ADMINISTRABLE AND SCOREABLE AND SHOULD BE BASED ON VALID INDICES OF LANGUAGE MATURITY. A RECENT STUDY BY KELLOG W. HUNT SUGGESTED THAT THESE INDICES BE BASED ON A NEW SYNTACTIC UNIT, THE T-UNIT, CONSISTING OF 1 MAIN CLAUSE TOGETHER WITH ANY CLAUSES SUBORDINATED TO IT. COORDINATED MAIN…

A generative semantic model for a componential analysis of prepositions in Italian sentences is described and critiqued. According to the model, a sentence is analyzed in terms of a "predicate" plus one or more "arguments." The model emphasizes the semantic role of prepositions and regards this role as the basis for a syntactic…

A review of research reveals that, although several reading researchers recognize the significance of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence in reading comprehension, little research exists in this area of grammatical interrelationships among sentences. The first step toward an understanding of grammatical complexity beyond the sentence is for…

The linguistic literature contains many studies of the structure of the noun phrase. Syntactic structures that occupy NP position but which don't have the internal characteristics of a substantive (infinitives and THAT clauses, for example) are distinguished from lexical structures that occupy NP position and do have the internal characteristics…

Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects…

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Mod 2 Reading Program is planned as a four-year program (K-3) for teaching reading skills to primary-grade children. The materials from the first- and second-year reading programs are designed with the following two goals in mind: to identify sentence structures that are beyond the syntactic capacity of the…

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…