The theme of this book is the concept of a sentence and the role which it plays in child language acquisition. The author argues that the concept of a sentence is innately available to children and is the "main guiding principle in a child's attempt to organize and interpret the linguistic evidence that fluent speakers make available to him."…

This is a tagmemic analysis of Lamini, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about one million people in Central India. The dialect described in the present study is that spoken in the Gulbarga District of northern Mysore State. An introductory section discusses the Lamini language and explains the tagmemic approach used in the study. The first chapter…

This study had two aims: (1) to determine whether there were significant differences in the syntax of college freshmen compositions of different overall quality, and (2) to determine whether certain syntactic indexes of writing maturity functioned as indexes of the quality of freshman writing. Two writing samples were elicited from 99 freshmen at…

Using methods developed in transformational generative grammar, three types of nominal constructions in Spanish are treated in this paper: Fact nominalizations ("[El] Escribir es agradable"), Manner nominalizations ("El tocar [de la mujer] es agradable"), and Abstract noun nominalizations ("La construccion rapida de esta escuela es dudosa"). While…

The author begins this paper with, "Let us recognize as axiomatic the statement that sentences in natural languages have the properties of structured, organic wholes." She feels that this statement has several important theoretical consequences, the most interesting (in so far as the current controversy over "surfacism" is…

This study of Gullah, written in 1926 by the late Reed Smith of the University of South Carolina, relies heavily on the work of earlier researchers, notably A.E. Gonzales, then editor of "The State" and author of the Black Border stories. The first two chapters presents a historical and literary background of Gullah speakers (American…

Class in Bantu and its syntactic significance is discussed with reference to gender in Indo-European and semantic/syntactic features of nouns. On the basis of modern Bantu evidence and the comparative method, a maximum of 21 classes have been posited for proto-Bantu. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto-Bantu and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the disruptive effect of unknown words on reading and to examine this effect in relationship to grammatical position and modification type. Forty second grade children from two different lower middle class, semirural schools were randomly assigned to the standardization group or the experimental group.…

This paper examines the meaning and functions of the directional suffixes (adverbial expressions of direction) in Kusaiean and Ponapean. It is shown that the directional suffixes have two semantic features of direction and terminus. Depending on the different contexts in which they are used, sometimes only one semantic feature is employed and…

This test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship existing between sentences that are similar in specific semantic content but different in syntactic structure. The test consists of twenty-five items of the three-option multiple-response type, with the stem of each item being a "pattern" sentence to be matched with one of the three…

Sentences in rhetoric texts were used in this study to determine a way in which thetorical syntactic parallelism can be analyzed. A tagmemic analysis determined tagmas which were parallel or identical or similar to one another. These were distinguished from tagmas which were identical because of the syntactic constraints of the language…

In order to discern whether sixth grade students with differing levels of reading achievement (as measured by the Paragraph Meaning subtest of the Stanford Achievement Test) also differed in the level of syntactic maturity evidenced in their response to a sentence combining task, a syntactic structure inventory of eight sentence-combining stimulus…

This study investigated the written and oral discourse of a subject with an established reputation as an author, editor, lecturer, and television host, to determine whether his written discourse was more complex syntactically than his spoken discourse. The oral language sample was taken from a taped television program in which the speaker…

Specific limitations of past research in teacher verbal questioning behavior are presented in this article for the purpose of providing recommendations for future research activities. Analyses are made by reviewing related literature. Limitation factors are identified as resulting from variations in the following aspects: teacher characteristics,…

In this report data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e. g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson in 1970. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering resulting from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth (1970) will have uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have…