This paper makes observations on verb classification which are considered relevant to the understanding of Swahili syntax. Three different syntactically relevant approaches are discussed: (1) establishing a set of "basic sentence types" and then classifying verbs according to their occurrence or non-occurrence in sentences of these…

This volume of working papers includes two papers concerned with syntactic analysis in English. The first paper deals with a number of problems that arise in conjunction with the necessary, allowed, or disallowed coreferentiality of a complement sentence subject with some noun-phrase in a higher sentence. The author seeks to prove that the…

Despite the similarity in the surface structure, sentences containing a semi-auxiliary (e.g., "avoid,""bother,""happen,""seem,""begin,""tend," etc.) followed by a "to" infinitive or a gerund show a number of differences among themselves in respect to the co-occurrence…

This paper discusses one way of exploring how we perceive and understand the connections between some parts of texts, or between one sentence and the whole discourse. Understanding ellipsis involves non-syntactic understanding; the semantic structure is responsible for our understanding of elliptical sentences and encoding the knowledge contained…

The thesis of this paper is that the "do so" test described by Lakoff and Ross (1966) is a test of the speaker's belief system regarding the relationship of verbs to their surface subject, and that judgments of grammaticality concerning "do so" are based on the speaker's underlying semantic beliefs. ("Speaker" refers here to both speakers and…

There is a set of French verbs which admits both indicative and subjunctive sentential complements. The indicative complement is correlated with a positive assertion about the truth of the complement; the subjunctive implies a neutral attitude or a non-assertion. When various sentential complement constructions are considered both in the…

This paper considers the way in which a grammar must account for the speaker's knowledge of sentence force as opposed to sentence form or meaning and the way in which this force is related to a sentence. According to the performative analysis approach, the force of each sentence should be stated explicitly as a part of the underlying…

The volume of working papers includes eight papers describing current theory and research in linguistics and in semantics and syntax. The following articles are in the collection: "The Grammar of Emotive and Exclamatory Sentences in English,""Linguistics as Chemistry: The Substance Theory of Semantic Primes,""On Perceptual and Grammatical…

This syntactic analysis of Egyptian colloquial Arabic is based on the author's dialect which he designates as educated Cairene. This study offers a phonological as well as morphological background for the grammar of this particular dialect. The basic syntactic approach used is immediate constituent analysis. String analysis and transformational…