A guide to linguistic analysis and to the three co-existing grammars--conventional, structural, and transformational--this glossary, which is directed to the beginning student, provides descriptions of terms and topics as they are used in their most frequent and familiar senses. Encyclopedic descriptions and information about the referent are…

Three different experiments were conducted to examine several variables that influence the recall of prose. In Experiment I a study was made of the influence of differing imagery level nouns as the subject and object of the preposition of a sentence; it also provided a further test of the conceptual peg model, i.e., the concrete-concrete-subject…

This article attempts to refute D.M. Perlmutter's claim that the syntactic component in Spanish grammar can generate structures that are grammatical at the deep structure level but not at the surface structure level, and that it is necessary to impose a surface structure constraint (SSC) as a filter to reject the ungrammatical structures. The…

An extrinsic relationship between generative semantics and dialect geography should be exploited because contemporary transformational grammarians have too easily ignored the work of the dialectologist and have been too readily satisfied with what might be called armchair evidence. The work of the dialect geographers needs to be taken into…

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 book, a revised and expanded English version of the author's Italian work "La Linguistica strutturale" (1961), is a survey of the main trends in structural linguistics intended not only for the linguist but for specialists in other fields and the general reader as well. The initial chapter, "Introductory Notions," discusses general linguistic…

The claim that the best language teaching materials are based on a contrast of the two competing linguistic systems has long been a popular one in language teaching. It exists in strong and weak versions, the strong one arising from evidence from the availability of some kind of metatheory of contrastive analysis and the weak from evidence from…

"Advanced student" is defined here as the kind of student who can converse with native speakers and read simplified or simple English prose at reasonable rates with good comprehension. Such a student, however, is still not ready for university-level reading. The major problem for the teacher is not teaching English words but English structures.…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

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 objective of the current work program is to develop an on-line computer capability that would assist an information analyst in processing textual materials. The initial result of the work program is the design of a system for text processing and a computer implementation of a preliminary model of the system that strongly supports the validity…

In this paper several instances in which a mirror-image (or "directionless") rule was added intact to an innovating grammar are presented, and it is argued that the form of such rules can be constrained in a special way. The author has found it necessary to distinguish rules added to an innovating grammar (diachronic rules) from rules already…

By looking at the history of geometry and the concept of congruence in geometry we can get a new perspective on how to think about the closeness in meaning of two sentences. As in the analysis of congruence in geometry, a definite and concrete set of proposals about congruence of meaning depends essentially on the kind of theoretical framework…

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…