This article, written in Russian, propounds the application of the contrastive method in teaching the morphology of Russian to English-speaking students. The presentation is based on categorization by parts of speech. Included here is a comparative analysis of nouns (gender, number, case, expression of definite and indefinite articles),…

There are four articles in this report; the first three were written by Charles J. Fillmore: "Lexical Entries for Verbs,""Review of 'Componential Analysis of General Vocabulary--The Semantic Structure of a Set of Verbs in English, Hindi, and Japanese, Part II' by Edward Herman Bendix," and "Types of Lexical…

Teaching should reflect the facts of current language usage. This descriptive approach, when applied to reading, means that the child's reading education should focus on the realities of daily life. Syntactic analysis in reading has been handicapped by an overemphasis on lexical content at the expense of other syntactic structures. Thus, the…

This paper deals with two experiments whose purposes are to investigate the linguistic competence of young children and their receptivity to adult speech. In the free response experiment, imperative sentences were presented to 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year-olds. The sentences were minimal (a single noun), telegraphic, or full adult sentences. The youngest…

This is an outline of the major characteristics of sentences like "Ali alikuwa mwalimu" (Ali was a teacher), "Ali ni mwalimu" (Ali is a teacher), and the numerous pattern variations demonstrated by such sentences. Constructions of this kind are traditionally called copula constructions, and have been classified in terms of (1)…

This paper is a response to Lavandera's question regarding the limits of the study of language variation. Sociolinguistics is characterized by its desire to limit representational meaning much more narrowly than formal linguistics. In addition while formal linguistics views language as species-specific and designed to accomodate logical…

In an examination of the relationship between language skill and reading achievement in adults, measures of syntactic knowledge and reading achievement were obtained for 41 students in an adult basic education center. Moderate correlations were found for language skill and reading achievement, with students reading at or below the fourth grade…

Some 2700 Belgian students (grades five through twelve) participated in this study of the relationships between linguistic features of passages and passage readability estimated from cloze procedures. Clozed versions of each of 60 test passages were prepared and administered to students at various grade levels. Twenty-five linguistic features of…

This is the fourth and final report in a series dealing with the impact of the modes of discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) on written syntactic complexity at the elementary school level. The first three reports dealt in turn with the three grade levels involved in the study (third, fourth, and fifth grades). This…

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between reading achievement and syntactic attainment. Two measures were used to provide the data: the Gates MacGinitie Reading Test, Survey E, and the Sentence Construction Test, Level E. The measures of reading and syntax were administered to 96 seventh-grade students in two suburban junior…

The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of ninth-grade slow readers with ninth-grade good readers and with sixth grade readers on a test of syntactic comprehension. The significant difference between the ninth-grade good readers' and the ninth-grade slow readers' performance on A Test of Sentence Meaning (ATSM), developed by…

To write well is not a singular ability; it utilizes critical thinking, creativity, and a feeling for language. An examination of a number of pieces of writing by elementary school pupils shows that some are highly imaginative while others are informative reports, simple statements of events, colorful descriptions, or various forms of poetry.…

The linguistic state-of-the-art relevant to the construction of a battery of tests intended to yield language proficiency profiles of preschool children is surveyed in this paper. A basic assumption is that language data can be structured with a model that reflects stages in the development of control over phonological features, morphological…

The study summarized in this paper deals with the grammatical analysis of the spontaneous speech of approximately 150 children who are classified as mentally disabled; educable (I.Q. range 50-80). The performance of these mentally disadvantaged children is compared with the performance of 200 normally developing children by using a clinical…

This paper is a report of two studies of the relationship between intonation and syntax. An analysis of intonation was used to decide whether the pivot-like two-morpheme constructions of a one- and one-half-year-old girl were single lexical items or two separate lexical items. Further, the intonation contours connected with her linguistically…