The constraints in English on the definiteness, specificity, humaness and animacy of noun phrases (NP's) undergoing passive and dative movement are examined. Evidence presented shows that these constraints occur in other languages in marked and unmarked constructions as absolute constraints on acceptability or as tendencies. This suggests a…

An 18-month study of the development of communicative competence in three Kaluli children from Papua, New Guinea, shows that Kaluli children use pragmatically appropriate word order before they correctly indicate "agent" by casemarking. In Kaluli, pragmatic concerns determine word order. The noun which the speaker intends to focus on is…

THIS GRAMMATICAL SKETCH IS A RUSSIAN-TO-ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE APPENDIX TO B.V. MILLER'S "PERSIDSKO-RUSSKIJ SLOVAR," MOSCOW, 1953. THE FIRST SECTION PRESENTS A COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE SOUND AND WRITING SYSTEMS OF MODERN PERSIAN, THE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF IRAN. FOLLOWING SECTIONS DEAL WITH THE PARTS OF SPEECH AND SIMPLE, COMPOUND,…

THE DIALECT UPON WHICH THIS CHRESTOMATHY IS BASED IS THE NORTHERN (SOSVA) DIALECT, SPOKEN BY THE MAJORITY OF THE VOGUL PEOPLE IN THE NORTHWESTERN PART OF SIBERIA. THE TEXTS, WHICH FURNISH A BASIS FOR THE GRAMMAR AND SOUND SYSTEM OF THIS BOOK, ARE TAKEN FROM TRANSCRIPTIONS OF MATERIAL RECORDED BY THE AUTHOR IN 1957-58. A DESCRIPTION OF THE VOWELS,…

THIS PAPER PROPOSES SOME INSIGHTS INTO THE PROBLEMS FACED BY SOMEONE ABOUT TO EMBARK ON A GENERATIVE GRAMMAR OF AZERBAIJANI. IT IS NOT A SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS, BUT A SAMPLING OF IDEAS PERTINENT TO SUCH AN ANALYSIS. THE PROBLEMS DEALT WITH ARE (1) GRAMMATICAL DEPTH IN AZERBAIJANI BASED ON VICTOR YNGVE'S DEFINITION OF "DEPTH"--A NUMBER OF SENTENCES OF…

THE LANGUAGE OF THE HAUSA TRIBE AND A LINGUA FRANCA FOR MANY INHABITANTS OF NIGERIA'S NORTHERN REGION, HAUSA IS GENERALLY CONSIDERED TO BE THE MOST IMPORTANT LANGUAGE OF WEST AFRICA AND HAS MANY DIALECTS. THIS TEXT IS BASED ON THE KANO DIALECT AND IS INTENDED AS A PRELIMINARY STUDY TO A MORE THOROUGH ANALYSIS OF HAUSA MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX, AND…

BASED ON A TRADITIONAL APPROACH, THIS REFERENCE GRAMMAR OF LITERARY DHIMOTIKI IS DESIGNED TO BE MOST USEFUL TO ADVANCED UNDERGRADUATES OR BEGINNING GRADUATE STUDENTS OF GREEK. (DHIMOTIKI, OR DEMOTIC, IS THE POPULAR FORM OF MODERN GREEK.) IN PART I THERE IS AN EXTENSIVE DESCRIPTION OF THE PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION OF THE WRITING…

AN ANALYSIS OF "T-UNITS" (THE MINIMAL TERMINABLE SYNTACTIC UNITS ALLOWED BY THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH), AS FOUND IN CHILDREN'S WRITING, IS A MORE SENSITIVE MEASURE OF GROWTH OF SYNTACTIC SKILL THAN TRADITIONAL CRITERIA. HUNT'S 1965 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CLASSROOM WRITING OF FOURTH-, EIGHTH-, AND 12TH-GRADE CHILDREN, AND OF MAGAZINE…

UNDER CONTRACT WITH THE AIR FORCE, THE LINGUISTICS RESEARCH CENTER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS CONDUCTED A RESEARCH PROJECT DESIGNED TO DEVELOP A GERMAN-ENGLISH SYNTACTIC TRANSLATION SYSTEM FOR SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL TEXTS. MORE SPECIFICALLY, THE OBJECTIVES WERE TO (1) WRITE A GERMAN-ENGLISH TRANSFER GRAMMAR THAT WOULD LINK THE LINGUISTIC…

THE EFFECT OF KNOWLEDGE OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR UPON COMPOSITION SKILLS WAS INVESTIGATED. GENERATIVE GRAMMAR DESCRIBES THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS OF PRODUCING SENTENCES. IN THIS STUDY, GENERATIVE GRAMMAR WAS TAUGHT TO NINTH- AND TENTH-GRADE STUDENTS. SEVERAL SPECIFIC QUESTIONS GUIDED THE STUDY--CAN HIGH SCHOOL PUPILS LEARN TO APPLY THE RULES OF A…

THE CONCERN OF THIS STUDY WAS THE EFFECT OF SENTENCES OF VARYING STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY ON PRIMARY GRADE CHILDREN'S ORAL READING, SILENT READING, AND LISTENING COMPREHENSION. THE AUTHOR PREPARED 36 ONE-SENTENCE "STORIES" WHICH VARIED IN STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY AS ASSESSED BY THE DEPTH HYPOTHESIS OF STRUCTURAL DEPTH (YNGVE, 1960), SECTOR…

The following papers on subject in South Asian languages are compiled here: (1) "Subject in Sanskrit" by George Cardona; (2) "Is Sinhala a Subject Language? (or, How Restricted is Your PNP?)" by James W. Gair; (3) "Some Syntactic Reflexes of Sub-Categories of Agent in Hindi" by Peter Edwin Hook; (4) "The Notion…

This study investigates the relationship between reading comprehension and eleven measures of syntactic writing maturity. The subjects were 144 third, fourth, and fifth grade students of the Travis Elementary School in Sulphur Springs, Texas. The two instruments used to collect data were an in-class composition, which provided a writing sample,…

The booklet discusses and reports on a study of elicited imitation as a vehicle for assessing the language-functioning level of echolalic autistic children. An historical overview is presented of the diagnosis of early infantile autism. The question of whether or not early infantile autism is a distinct syndrome is addressed. The theoretical and…

This study addressed four questions raised in syntactic acquisition studies conducted by Carol Chomsky and others. Specifically, questions concerned the nature of syntactic structures in children's language repertoires, the uniformity and rate of acquisition of particular structures, the generalizability of the minimal-distance principle, and the…