Discusses problems related to case grammar theory, including: the organizations of a case grammar; determination of semantic roles; definition and hierarchy of cases; cause-effect relations; and formalization and notation. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Contradicts Pablo Jordan's theory that certain "se" constructions in Spanish are neither passive nor reflexive. It is claimed that syntactic evidence reveals two types of impersonal structures, the impersonal active and the passive reflexive. (Text is in Spanish.) (CK)

Discusses the causative infix "dz" in Mikasuki, from the point of view of morphology and syntax, with a view to the development of an adequate linguistic description of Mikasuki grammar. (AM)

Event and factive causatives are distinguished. It is argued that ba-sentences in Mandarin Chinese are event causatives par excellence and that the ba and bei constructions, by deriving from the same underlying representation, can be shown to receive a unified account, if they are given a causative analysis. (Author/RM)

The morphemes /-k/ and /-m/ function as nominal case endings and as verbal syntactic and derivational suffices. They are also polysemous rather than homophonous in Yavapai. Many verbal suffixes are accounted for by the referent-switching rule, indicating the subject of a verb in relation to the next highest verb. (SC)

There exists a need to identify and recognize the Spanish dialect used in the Southwest United States in order to change the tradition of looking at it as inferior to standard Spanish and to English. The history of the Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest and of the changes in their culture brought about by colonialism is connected with the…

A study of the effect of an "incremental" version of a generative rhetoric approach to writing instruction was conducted to determine whether such an approach would increase students' syntactic complexity. Ninety-eight college students were randomly assigned to one of five experimental or five control sections of a freshman composition…

Sentence combining is one kind of practice activity, quite specific in character, aimed at teaching syntactic fluency and judgment and the use of the devices of cohesion. Students can be led through the revision process step by step by converting the odd essay from real writing to a practice exercise, then actually providing the content needed for…

Recently collected evidence shows the likely existence of twelve South American Indian languages with object-initial word order. This is contrary to what had been generally predicted in the literature on word order typology before 1977. Numerous examples are provided of OVS (Object-Verb-Subject) and OSV (Object-Subject-Verb) word order, primarily…

The specific concern in this study is to consider the nature, social significance, and consequences of syntactic variation in the question forms used by judges when taking guilty pleas from criminal defendents. Nine judges from a court of general jurisdiction in Arizona were observed and tape-recorded while presiding over several procedures that…

The following papers are included: (1) "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition" (Krashen); (2) "Talking to Foreigners versus Talking to Children: Similarities and Differences" (Freed); (3) "The Levertov Machine" (Stevick); (4) "Acquiring a Second Language when You're Not the Underdog" (Edelsky and…

Children's ability to infer dominant or subordinate status of speakers from their requests was investigated. It was hypothesized that, for young children, syntactic indirectness, semantic softness, and a positive tone, in the absence of other cues, would serve as cues to indicate that a speaker is subordinate to a listener. Syntactic directness,…

It has long been said that there are an infinite number of English sentences. "This is the cat that caught the rat" is an Enqlish sentence. So is "This is the cat that caught the rat that stole the cheese.""This is the cat with white paws that caught the rat that stole the cheese" is unobjectionable as well. Since a…

Controlled composition--a method closely related to sentence combining--can be beneficial for college students whose writing is characterized by frequent errors and lack of fluency. Controlled composition consists of copying short, competently written compositions exactly except for certain stipulated changes. The assignments, which progress in…

A review of the state of machine translation considers the historical development of the process, how it works, and results of users' evaluations. Machine translation is the process of translating one language into another through the use of the computer, following the linguistic and computational instructions supplied to it by human researchers…