Presents arguments refuting the Chomskian case for nativism, and shows that a theory of language universals may be used in support of the empiricist view. (AM)

This article is a contrastive study of the devices Russian and German dispose of in order to designate a receptacle with content and without it. The German opposition "Wodkaflasche-Flasche Wodka" is represented in Russian by four constructions: relational adjective, genitive, and prepositional forms ("s" and "iz-pod"). (SW)

Discusses the principles of linguistic deviance in terms of five sets of rules and their corresponding linguistic or para-linguistic parameters. This theoretical framework relates assimilation, grammatical, lexical, referential, and reality rules to the parameters of acceptability, grammaticality, factuality, validity, and truth respectively. (EJS)

Syntactical and stylistic characteristics are used to assess the degree of specialization of scientific writing. Two groups of articles dealing with the same subject but differing in degree of specialization are compared; the technical articles have lower percentages of function words and higher numbers of noun adjuncts than the general articles.…

Children between the ages of 6 and 11 learn to understand and use the relative pronouns "qui" and "que." The closer the subordinate clause is to favorite word order, the easier it is for the child. (MLA)

Discusses a study which focused on how well elementary children supply appropriate intonation to written sentences and which found that many intonation patterns predictable by syntax had not been mastered even by children who were reading on fourth and fifth grade levels. (JM)

An editorialized report of data accumulated in a study of current American practice in the treatment of problems of usage in general purpose dictionaries. Their descriptive objectivity is characterized as "that of the blind men examining the elephant." Such practices reveal little change from that of Samuel Johnson's 1755 English…

Argues that the nonfuture use of "will" has exactly the same semantic structure as the future "will," and that the basic meaning of "will" is potential rather than future. (Author/HP)

An examination of the predicates "optional" and "obligatory" is made that suggests that they are far more appropriately viewed as derived rather than primitive notions, whose appropriate attributions follow in all cases from independent linguistic facts and principles of a much more general and more generally significant character. (Author/HP)

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers to our utterance of it, and has a higher performative clause of the form "I plus Verb plus You." This paper deals with data that have been used to support this analysis, and shows that they do not confirm it. (CHK)

A hypothesis for the aphasic syndrome of aggramatism--the omission of function words and inflectional morphemes--is presented. The author tests and illustrates the efficacy of closely observing substantive universals of grammatical structure in proposing accounts of linguistic defects. (Author/MV)

Presents some examples of differences of meaning, as well as "secondary effects," in noun phrases using or omitting the articles, definite and indefinite, in German, e.g.: "Die Kinder machen Krach,""Die Kinder machen den Krach," and "Die Kinder machen einen Krach!" The question is seen as needing much more research. (WGA)

Recent studies show that, although graphemic clues are fundamental to reading, older readers can effectively use syntactic and semantic context to improve their perception of word possibilities; the teaching of reading should include helping students increase their use of these supplemental cues. (JM)