Teaching children to write successfully is an area of great concern to educators in the 21 st century. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, the writing skills of two-thirds of the students in elementary, middle, and high school are below grade level proficiency (Persky, Daane, & Jin, 2003). In 2003, the…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

Children's cognizance of linguistic selectional rules was studied in a controlled sentence production task. Forty-five third grade and 45 sixth grade children wrote noun responses in active and passive sentence frames in which only verbs and function words were given. The verbs varied in how animate nouns were required as both logical subjects and…

This examination of Richard Montague's grammar as it is manifested in his study, "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English" (PTQ) proposes that the theory contains significant flaws and raises fundamental methodological questions about the aims of logic and linguistics. The first part of this discussion presents the…

It has been demonstrated (in the research described here) that people hearing sentences on a tape recording process underdetermined sentences differently than people hearing them in a conversation. It has been shown that this difference is caused by the presence of underdetermined elements but not ordinary transformations. The effect of ordinary…

Original version of this paper presented at Indiana University, Bloomington, on February 7, 1972. (VM)

A research strategy for educational engineering is outlined which includes the transformation of scientific knowledge into tables of useful measures. The applications of such a process are fully discussed. (PR)

The authors of a previous paper on aspects of generalized phrase structure grammar respond to criticism of that paper and clarify elements in the discussion. The original paper addressed the problem of expressing relevant generalizations about the order of complements that a lexical item subcategorizes for. (MSE)

A study of the meanings of "generation," a popular term in current rhetorical jargon, reveals important developments in the art and theory of rhetoric. As now used, it refers without clear distinction to rule-governed, heuristic, and trial-and-error procedures. The rule-governed procedures of transformation grammar are being employed to…

Before beginning the Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, it was necessary to determine whether to base the analysis on a corpus or on native intuitions. It seemed that the best method would combine the theoretical and the empirical. A translation method based on a corpus of text was adopted. The Brown University "Standard Sample of…

The inadequacies of traditional and transformational models of grammar are overcome in the systemic-functional approach of Halliday, where meaning is built into the grammar and the text is the basic unit. Here, the functional approach is seen in the stress on the role of social/cultural context and in the importance of the role of register, which…

The authors respond to Dresher and Hornstein's article (EJ 161 384, Cognition, December, 1976) on artificial intelligence (AI). The dispute between linguistic theorists and AI researchers is based upon their different aims; while AI researchers develop programs capable of intelligent behavior, transformational linguists study the characteristics…

Presents an outline for a theory of syntax acquisition, surveys other approaches to language acquisition, and addresses the following methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; and (3) the domain of the theory. (Author/AM)

THE FREQUENCY OF 'ASPECT' (PERFECT AND PROGRESSIVE IN THE AUXILIARY) WAS REPORTED FOR RETARDED, NORMAL, AND SUPERIOR CHILDREN ACROSS AGE AND THE ORAL AND WRITTEN LANGUAGE MODALITIES. DATA WERE LIMITED IN SEVERAL RESPECTS, PARTICULARLY SIZE OF SAMPLE. THIS IS A PILOT STUDY RATHER THAN A SERIOUS EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE…

TO DISPEL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH TEACHERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED BY THE LINGUIST. THE LINGUIST SEES LANGUAGE AS "A SYSTEM OF PATTERNED VOCAL BEHAVIOR BY MEANS OF WHICH MEN COOPERATE IN SOCIETY." BY USING RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC METHODS, HE STUDIES REPRESENTATIVE AND AUTHENTIC…