A study of Dogrib, an Athapascan language, focuses on long-distance agreement in the case of reflexives. While this "control" relationship has generally been considered in the context of infinitives, it is proposed that evidence from long distance agreement in Dogrib indicates that control is also relevant for languages without…

Summarizing research activities from January 1977 to September 1978, this is the fourth annual report of research on speech processing conducted in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. The report includes extended manuscripts, short reports, progress reports, and information on instrumentation developments and software support. The…

An analysis of high vowel variation in Quebec French shows that the phenomenon can generally be accounted for in terms of stress and syllabic closure. However, it is also proposed that by positing underlying lax high vowels in the language, a more insightful analysis is achieved, suggesting that a process of high vowel tensing is occurring…

This book contains 15 essays written between 1969 through 1983. The essays included are: (1) "Semantic Analysis of Verbs in Terms of Conceptual Situations"; (2) "'Because' and the Concepts of Causation"; (3) "The Development of Language as Purposive Behavior"; (4) "Adaptation and Viability"; (5) "On the…

Metathesis, usually described in descriptive or historical linguistics as sporadic change, is investigated as a systematic phonological change using data from Gascon, an Occitan dialect. In the first chapter, the controversy over metathesis as a phonological change is presented and discussed from the standpoint of historical development. In…

A study investigated dialect change in a southern Netherlands city, where the dialect spoken is distant from Dutch in phonology, morphology, and lexicon. The dialect is commonly spoken in the city of Maastricht, and is not restricted to one social class. Subjects were 64 native inhabitants of Maastricht from three generations: older (over 55…

The properties of presupposition were investigated in Japanese and English. The investigation examined how the presupposition is preserved under different syntactic structures, and identified presupposition in terms of the transitivity of factive verbs. Japanese was seen as more clearly manifesting "presuppositionability" than English in…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

To determine the utility of the commonly taught phonics rule "if the only vowel in a word is at the end of that word, it usually stands for a long sound," a study evaluated all of the single syllable entries in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." When the letter "y" was considered a vowel, 72 words were…

To determine the usefulness of two commonly taught phonics rules concerning the pronounciation of two-syllable words, a study analyzed more than 138,000 words in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." The rules state that (1) a vowel is short when the only vowel in a syllable is not the last letter in…

This study was designed to answer the following three questions: (1) Are infants' first words always context-bound when they are initially acquired? (2) Do mothers use infants' first words in a context-bound manner when interacting with their infants? (3) What relationship, if any, exists between infants' initial use of early words and mothers'…

Applied linguistics, like language teaching, is in a state of disarray. It has been caught in the turmoil associated with the downfall of the theoretical model and the rise of several others. It is no longer identified solely with language teaching, but has begun to explore the solution of language problems in nonformal educational settings and…

An analysis of the Dinka (Sudan) vowel system consists of: (1) an overview of Dinka phonological structure, including the phonological sentence, the phonological word, the syllable, and the consonantal and vocalic features of the sound system; (2) an examination of breathy versus nonbreathy vowels, including a review of previous research using a…

A study investigated the range of articulatory patterns in French in which occlusive consonants are followed by anterior vowels, and the resulting acoustic phenomena. Articulatory factors examined include the place of articulation of the occlusive consonant; the nature of contact during the occlusion; articulatory movements at the consonants'…

A study examined whether children increased their vocabularies as a result of hearing unfamiliar words within the oral context of a story and observed the oral strategies the children employed as they attempted to define a new word. Subjects, 64 males and 64 females, were from self-contained third-grade classrooms in public schools in a small town…