Concludes that teachers should use less difficult reading material when administering oral reading tests for a true picture of a child's syntactic and contextual strategies. (MKM)

Proposes an approach to contrastive linguistics which takes into account syntax and semantics, and discusses the role of such an approach in explaining surface structure differences between English and Chinese sentences of the type: "He is a good pianist" and "I have a bad knee." (AM)

Normalized legal drafting, a mode of expressing ideas in legal documents so that the syntax that relates the constituent propositions is simplified and standardized, and the query method, a question-asking activity that teaches normalized drafting and provides practice, are examined. Some examples are presented. (JMD)

Examines and evaluates 20th-century studies in Zhunyanese linguistics, particularly work accomplished since 1955. Discussion focuses on how the studies were developed, what their current state is, and where problems are. A bibliography follows, covering only those works mentioned in the main text. (Author/KM)

Investigates whether students at different ages write "beyond" their normal syntactic maturity. The authors also discuss whether students at different levels write at a level which is syntactically less mature than their own level and, if so, to what extent they adjust their syntax when told to write for a less mature audience. (Author/RK)

Analysis and comparison of the decoding strategies of 50 Hawaiian Islands dialect speakers in grades four, five, and six showed statistically significant differences in the strategies used by average and below-average readers in each grade and across succeeding grade levels. (JM)

A review of analyses of conditionals (in the philosophical literature) and of topics (primarily in linguistics) reveals that their definitions are very similar. This paper justifies the method of basing semantic analysis of a construction on a cross-linguistic examination of its superficial form. (Author/NCR)

The article determines the linguistic affiliation of the Nakipa and Yakakwal peoples, who became extinct before the turn of the century, as Paopai and Kiliwa, respectively. The article uses ethnohistoric and historic sources to explain the theory. (Author/NCR)

Describes ongoing research into errors in spontaneous speech. (RM)

Theorizes that the linguistic basis for Texas Spanish comes from at least two dialectically distinct zones and attempts to discover the morphosyntactic varieties in Spanish of second and third generation bilingual speakers. (Text is in Spanish.) (NCR)

The subject of this article is a Cantonese-speaking infant who arrived in the U.S. at 16 months. At 19 months, three striking anomalies marked her Cantonese speech. These anomalies are discussed; it is proposed that their origin may have been her new English-speaking environment. (CHK)

Deaf children's understanding of certain aspects of verb phrase negation was investigated in a study involving 175 deaf Ss (8 to 14 years old) and a comparison group of 40 hearing children (6 to 7 years old). (SBH)

A presentation of an experiment testing the claim that on-line syntactic processing is autonomous and not affected by semantic content. Results suggested that before the clause boundary is reached, syntactic decisions can be influenced by prior semantic context. An appendix containing numerous examples of clauses and probe words is included. (AMH)

An analysis of some of the historical rules of consonant deletion, vowel deletion, nasalization, and initial h-deletion--all recapitulated synchronically within the transformational generative accounts of French linking--showing that they have undergone morphologization in the form of inversion, and that h-aspire words have been assigned the…

A system of grammatical analysis is presented which has certain mathematical properties and which produces the sentences of a language by means of two simple processes: word-entry and entry-reduction. This system is not an alternative to descriptions of grammatical patterns, but rather a complement to them. (DS)