In translating perception into written language, a child must learn an encoding process which is a continuation of the process of improving sensing of the world around him or her. To verbalize an object (a perception) we use frames which name a referent, locate the referent in space and time, identify its appearance and behavior, and define terms…

The difficulty of obtaining usable information about the mental processes involved in the use of language has been a major obstacle in the design of effective writing programs. The antipsychological, behavioristic bias of American linguistics, which prevented any study of the deeper mental processes of language production, was remediated in part…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

Criteria for defining individual members of the preposition word class are set forth. Arguments are presented against calling prepositions meaningless, yet it is conceded and explained that those which occur in wider contexts are vaguer due to their greater variability. The unitary, polysemous, and/or homonymous nature of prepositions are…

In a study extending and refining Carol Chomsky's research, 48 Arabic speaking children aged six, eight, and ten were tested for their comprehension of imperatives using the complement-requiring verbs Ask, Tell, and Promise. Clear support for children's overgeneralization of the minimal distance principle was found only with Promise constructions.…

The following articles on syntax and semantics were researched at the Harvard Syntax Workshop: (1) "Clause Reduction in Spanish," by Judith Aissen and David Perlmutter; (2) "Reduced WH-Questions," by Robin Bechhofer; (3) "Reduction in Conjoined WH-Questions," by Robin Bechhofer; (4) "On Subject-to-Object Raising…

Eye movement data were collected for 28 college students reading 32 sentences with sentence verification questions. The factors observed were target sentence voice (active/passive), probe voice, and correct response (true/false). Pairs of subjects received the same set of stimuli, but with agents and objects in the sentences reversed. As expected,…

THIS MANUAL PRESENTS VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE STRUCTURE OF KHALKHA MONGOLIAN, THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF THE MONGOLIAN PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC (OUTER MONGOLIA). THE AUTHOR USES THE TERM "CYRILLIC KHALKHA" TO DISTINGUISH THIS WRITTEN FORM FROM THE SPOKEN KHALKHA DIALECTS AND "SCRIPT MONGOLIAN" (EAST MONGOLIAN WRITTEN IN VERTICAL SCRIPT).…

THE NOUN PHRASE IN HEBREW IS DESCRIBED IN TERMS OF ITS "TRANSFORMATIONAL" HISTORY. THE NOUN PHRASES OF HEBREW ARE CLASSIFIED ON THE BASIS OF TYPES OF ADJACENT, OR MODIFYING STRUCTURES WITHIN THE NOUN PHRASE. GRAMMATICAL RULES ARE FORMULATED TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS OF SENTENCE AMBIGUITY, THE RELATIONS BETWEEN CERTAIN SENTENCE STRUCTURES, AND…

Based on the assumption that major sentence errors are caused by a deficit in syntactic fluency that can be aided by sentence combining instruction, student writing errors are analyzed in this paper and explanations are provided showing how these errors could have been prevented or reduced through instruction in sentence combining. Some types of…

Techniques of teaching the English finite verb to speakers of other languages must account for meaning that is signalled by the structure alone and meaning derived from the context. Accordingly, this study attempts to distinguish the semantic components of the finite verb structure. The structure is viewed as being always composed of the following…

This study examined the use of directive speech forms by 46 children 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-years of age as a function of different tasks (play with dolls versus play with colored stickers) and of the presence versus absence of a peer partner. Directive utterances were stimultaneously categorized according to structure, form and the person they…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine syntax comprehension by poor and average prereaders in first grade and poor and average readers in second grade, to determine whether a relationship exists between reading ability or reading readiness and comprehension of syntax. Subjects were 55 first-grade children and 56 second-grade children of…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

This study was designed to examine complexity of maternal language to 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old male and female infants in a laboratory situation as measured by mean length of utternace (MLU), frequencies of certain sentence types, and other syntactic indices. Subjects were 36 mothers and their infants. There were six male and six female infants at…