Some composition teachers believe that students may write more competently in subject matter courses than in writing courses. That is, the constraints of writing for a class or assignment in which the composition skills will be evaluated may prevent students from writing their best. With this in mind, a study was conducted to determine whether…

Relational Grammar, which has evolved from transformational grammar, relies on a "universal grammar" approach. By closely studying this approach, linguists will be able to understand Relational Grammar (RG) well enough to be able to participate in its further development. The basic assumptions of RG are that…

The generic use of masculine terms may be viewed as a grammatical device that carries the non-specific meaning of gender without confusion with the specific meaning, or as a practice in which the masculine terms retain their gender-specific meaning in neutral contexts and bias the perceiver toward the interpretations of male references. In three…

The acquisition of reading fluency crucially involves the beginning reader's tacit recognition that he or she must learn to compensate for the absence of graphic signals corresponding to certain prosodic cues by making better use of the morphological and syntactic cues that are preserved. The success of the method of repeated readings and similar…

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO SELECED ASPECTS OF THE LINGUISTICS ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH IS PRESENTED IN THIS MONOGRAPH. FOLLOWING A DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE AND AN EXPLANATION OF THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS, THE PEDAGOGICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE INADEQUACIES OF TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR ARE EXAMINED. THE CONSIDERATION OF STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IN ENGLISH CENTERS ON PHONOLOGY…

THIS REFERENCE GRAMMAR WAS WRITTEN TO FILL THE NEED FOR AN UP-TO-DATE ANALYSIS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE SUITABLE FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS AS WELL AS LINGUISTS. THE AUTHOR LISTS IN THE INTRODUCTION THOSE STUDIES PREVIOUS TO THIS ONE WHICH MAY BE OF INTEREST TO THE READER. INCLUDED IN HIS ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE ARE MAJOR CHAPTERS ON--(1) PHONOLOGY, (2)…

ONE APPROACH TO CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IS THAT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL, GENERATIVE GRAMMAR WHICH EMPHASIZES MAN'S ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND AND PRODUCE AN UNLIMITED VARIETY OF SENTENCES THROUGH CONTROL OF A LIMITED NUMBER OF LANGUAGE RULES. THUS, A CHILD LEARNS TO SPEAK BY DEVELOPING HIS OWN THEORIES OF THE STRUCTURE OF HIS LANGUAGE. STUDIES OF…

Twenty-four adults participated in an experiment to determine the difficulty of conditional sentences of the kinds frequently found in the instructions in government forms. The stimulus materials were 128 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press button Y," where X was replaced by sixteen different coordinate structures. These…

This volume contains six articles. In "Integrational Linguistics as a Basis for Contrastive Studies," Hans-Heinrich Lieb discusses the problems associated with complex contrastive analysis. Hanne Martinet's "A Functional and Contrastive Analysis of Attributive Adjectives Endings in '-ant' and in '-ende' in French and Danish,…

Readability estimates are usually based on measures of word difficulty and measures of sentence difficulty. Word difficulty is measured in two ways: by the structural size and complexity of words or by reference to phonomena of language use, such as word-list frequency or the regularity of spelling patterns. Sentence difficulty is measured only in…

This study compared syntactic complexity and vocabulary diversity in two groups of books that can be used for reading aloud to preschool children: books recommended by authorities in reading and children's literature for reading aloud and "grocery store" books (small, inexpensive picture books that can be purchased in grocery stores).…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The use of "wh" forms in questions asked by four children was recorded from age 22 to 36 months, and analyzed. In the emergence of "wh" forms, the children first asked identifying questions with "what" and "who," followed in order by (1) "wh" pronominal questions which ask for major sentence…

The 2,459 entries in this bibliography on transformational grammar and related areas are written in, and deal with, a wide variety of languages. The listings, covering available publications up to early 1968, include texts, journal articles, papers and other works, and reviews of some of the more outstanding writings. (AMM)

Findings of a seminar which explored the current linguistics methods of teaching elementary reading and examined the background of this approach and some programs constant with it are presented. The seminar established the following set of criteria for describing the important characteristics of a linguistics method: (1) task definitions of…