A study investigating the independence of linguistic abilities from each other, specifically the separability of syntax and semantics and the autonomy of syntactic abilities, is described. In the study, 30 individuals with Alzheimer's disease produced spontaneous conversations, completed sentences eliciting 16 grammatical forms, and when possible,…

This study investigates the influence on sentence encoding of activating appropriate contextual knowledge. A group of 72 undergraduate students randomly assigned to four treatment groups read and were later asked to recognize sentences from a passage. In one group, subjects were told nothing about the passage from which the sentence was taken. In…

Notes from a diary kept on the language acquisition of a child from age 11 to 22 months, through four developmental stages, were used to investigate the interaction between the child's phonological systems and his developing syntactic system in the context of research on the emergence of multiword combinations. The presence of a phonological…

A collection of three papers written at a workshop on discourse grammar in Philippine languages is presented. The aims of the workshop were to (1) focus on discourse level grammar in the languages studied; (2) identify contrastive discourse types (genre) in the surface grammar; (3) identify the semantic constructions encoded by the different…

A lexical representational analysis of Classical Arabic is proposed that captures a generalization that McCarthy's (1979, 1981) autosegmental analysis misses, namely that idiosyncratic characteristics of the derivational binyanim in Arabic are lexical, not morphological. This analysis captures that generalization by treating all the idiosyncracies…

A discussion of the treatment of suffixes in Korean linguistic theory argues that, in view of recent clitic typology, Korean case markers and verbal suffixes are better analyzed in lexical rather than in syntactic terms. Evidence for this approach is found in phonological phenomena, morpheme and allomorph selection, and compounding. The most…

The adequacy of mean length of utterance (MLU) as a criterion for matching retarded and normally developing children was investigated. Six normally developing and four retarded subjects were matched on MLU. Although matched on MLU, these two groups of children demonstrated both quantitative and qualitative differences in their use of language.…

The relation definition theory proposed in this paper is explicitly different from previous semantic memory theories since it is the first to make a relation's definition the basis of semantic processing. The paper suggests that this relation definition theory successfully predicts relation similarity on the basis of one key primary assumption:…

Features are discussed that are critical to the comprehension of texts and that readability formulas cannot handle. The critique and alternative analyses are confined to public and institutional documents and are based on research in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Two types of comprehensibility complications are examined, those…

This paper studies legal language from three perspectives. First, legal language is defined as the variety of English that lawyers, judges, and other members of the legal community use in the course of their work. In a second section, it reviews descriptions of legal language by lawyers, linguists, and social scientists. These studies indicate…

Based on a model developed by Brown and Levinson (1978), this thesis examines one feature underlying appropriate language use--politeness--as it affects the discourse of native English speakers in three situations. The three situations and speakers involved are: (1) British speakers in a British public library, (2) American speakers in an American…

Definitions of communicative competence and research on developing communicative competence in a second language are reviewed and implications for teaching are discussed. Communicative competence refers not only to knowledge of the forms of a language but to their functions and appropriate use in context. Five areas of communicative competence are…

This is a report on the activities of the survey of spoken English at the University of Lund (Sweden), during the period 1975-81. The aim of the survey has been to make available in machine-readable form a corpus of material with its origin in speech. The corpus was built in conjunction with the survey of English usage project at the University of…

The existence of a developmental sequence for the acquisition of specific complex syntactic structures in English was investigated through an analysis of eight studies of Danish subjects. The studies involved Danish speaking subjects acquiring English as a second language at ages 7-10, 13, and 18. The evidence from these studies demonstrate a…

Several theories on bilingualism are studied and compared. (PP)