States that language teaching materials aimed at producing competence in a language must be based on a knowledge of the rules underlying the language and considers transformational generative grammar as essential in developing such materials. (FB)

Maintains that students' understanding of the language structure" is of relatively low priority in elementary language arts education. (Author/RD)

Results of tests comparing the ability of children and adults to understand and produce sentences according to type (active, question, passive, negative) and complexity (simple, center-embedding, double-embedding). (Author/FWB)

Three linguistic theories (the creolist, the transformationalist, and the ethnolinguistic) of the origin and historical development of Ebonics in America are examined. (Author/MC)

Proposes an alternative to transformational grammars, based on the notion that a grammatical system should be open to psycholinguistic interpretation, and disallowing grammatical transformations, dealing instead with the information content of sentence surface structure. (Author/AM)

Suggests using a sentence construction game to make basic writing students more aware of their linguistic ability and more comfortable dealing with grammar. Indicates that the experience helps students in revising their writing and introduces the experience of working creatively and playfully with language. (TJ)

The report presents an analysis of the underlying structure of simple stories and examines the implications of such structure for recall. Data comparing recall by children and adults suggest that story schemata differ somewhat at various points in development and that consequently there are qualitative differences in recall. (RC)

The purpose of this paper is to examine process- and agent-oriented sentences from the point of view of two theories of grammatical description: case grammar after Fillmore and tranformational grammar with modifications introduced by Chomsky. Subject and object functions are reflected in the initial structures of sentence derivation, regardless of…

A significant discovery of generative theory is that the features present in a lexical entry in a sentence's deep structure influence choice and arrangement of words in the surface structure. The systemic and nonsystemic functions of Spanish count and measure entity nouns are elaborated and analyzed. (CHK)

The brain, a pattern-finding organ, seeks to create meaning through establishing or refining existing neural networks; this is learning. Emotion affects what is learned and what is retained.

The linguist does not usually describe grammatical structures of stylized sentences because there are none well-formed on the surface. He could use rules for organizational and relational features of the grammar which affect the last lines of generation to produce deviant but acceptable linguistic forms, thereby increasing the predictive power of…

The implications of the properties of certain recursive rules are explored. It is concluded that (a) no completely coherent system of rules could allow perniciously recursive rules, and (b) certain constructions of English can only be described using perniciously recursive rules. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

Underlying structures in English sentences containing the verbs "order" and "tell" are compared. (Available from Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland) (RM)

Three aspects of existential sentences in English and Polish are discussed, and on the basis of the considerations of the logical and structural characteristics of existential sentences, some conclusions are drawn concerning the deep structure and derivation of these sentences. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)