The purpose of the study was to investigate children's understanding of "before" and "after" in temporal directions, in temporal questions, and in pictorial events through the use of three interview methods. The subjects for the study were 62 children, ranging in age from 40 to 80 months, enrolled in a half-day, private nursery/kindergarten…

Nonsense forms with nonsense labels were utilized in a match to sample task to observe whether children's word extensions are based on static form characteristics or on functional action characteristics. The stimuli consisted of: (1) a single model object which performed an action; (2) a selection array consisting of one object similar in form to…

Formulae in composition can be derived and applied through a three-part process: first, analyzing passages and deriving formulae; second, writing sentences from formulae; and third, writing a composition using only sentences derivable from the formulae. Student participation in all three parts provides better motivation and demonstrates to…

In a sentence containing a conjunction "when,""once," or "as soon as," the events in the main and the subordinate clauses are understood as occurring closely together in time. This paper endeavors to uncover the subtle differences which nevertheless exist among them. Clauses headed by "when" can refer to a…

This study relates the suffix "-age" to "-able,""-eux,""-ment,""-Xtion," and "-ure" in Quebec French. Morphologically, some "-age" suffixals which can be denominal in Quebec French can only be deverbal in European French. Semantically, "-age" deverbals are subdivided…

The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of…

The second volume in this series contains seven articles dealing with various aspects of Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis. They are: "Derivation in Serbo-Croatian and English," by Zeljko Bujas; "Predicative Patterns for English Adjectives and Their Contrastive Correspondents in Serbo-Croatian," by Vladimir Ivir; "Numeratives and…

In the contemporary standard Warsaw Polish of educated Poles, there is evidence of a system of gender-marking whereby masculine-gender nouns are being substituted for feminine professional names, working titles and surnames. The current usage is attributed to the change of status of the modern woman, or, more precisely, to her increased…

This reference grammar of Japanese is divided into thirty-one major sections: (1) notational conventions, including spelling, punctuation, accent, and juncture; (2) sentence construction: nuclear sentences and expanded sentences; (3) predicate adjuncts; (4) expansion constraints and noun subcategorization; (5) voice conversions; (6) nuclear focus…

Together with a study of object complements, a succinct description of the Malay classifier construction is given. Object complementation is studied in a generative-transformational framework. For sentence object complements, four types of surface structure are proposed, but it is claimed that two types of deep structure trees underlie the…

Arguing that slot-cards teach the structure of the verb and the grammatical message each slot carries while reducing the number of forms to be learned, the author describes a technique for teaching the tense modes of the present indicative, the present subjunctive, and the perfect indicative in French. A working model of the verb stems "aimer" and…

Shilha, which is spoken in southwest Morocco, is one of the most widely distributed of the Berber languages. The dialect described in the work is found in the area extending from Agadir to Ifni and as far east as Taroudant. This study provides a general description of the structure of the language by examing the phonology, morphology, major form…

To determine children's knowledge of the less frequent grammatical usages of words that may occur in more than one part of speech, lists of such words were developed. The grammatical functions of 1220 common words from two word counts were examined; about 50% were found to be grammatically ambiguous. Data were collected from about 1500 children in…

Several methods illustrating how textbooks traditionally teach the use of pronouns in discourse in Thai are examined and criticized in this study. Examples of how "referential identity" and "lexical identity" are interrelated are provided. It is pointed out that (1) the semantic features of age, gender, and relationship are not sufficient to…

Warns against the overuse of cohesive conjunctions in writing and recommends that teachers instruct students on contextual use of conjunctions rather than on their random use. (CRH)