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Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their normally developing (ND) peers imitated proper nouns, the pronouns "he" and "you," and the article "the" in subject phrases. Both groups showed significantly more omissions of the function words than the proper nouns. A phonological explanation of subject article and pronoun omission is explored. (DB)

The performance of 17 youth on a verbatim recall task indicated that skilled deaf readers are more able than average deaf readers to sustain a record of English function words and inflections. The relative speed of skilled readers when making lexical decisions about phonologically similar word pairs indicated greater access to phonological information during word reading. (Author/JDD)

Attempts to help teachers deal with English articles causing problems with English-as-a-Second-Language learners, particularly when the mother tongue of the learner has no equivalents. The discussion focuses on whether "a" and "the" should be taught and then looks at a description that may provide a relevant starting point for a reappraisal. (14 references) (GLR)

Explores the fit between syntax and semantics by addressing the following questions: (1) To what extent is the distribution of bare infinitive complements semantically motivated? and (2) What is the function of infinitival to? (46 references) (GLR)

Reviews theories proposed on the use of Japanese demonstratives. The basic function of Japanese demonstratives is discussed, and an analysis of the use of these demonstratives from a deicitic point of view, based on psychological development, is offered as an alternative to previous theories. (GLR)

Object deletion in Classical Arabic is semantically marked on two levels: ( 1) dropping the object deliberately but functionally; and (2) emptying the object slot and focusing on the verbal action. The second level of object deletion stresses the verbal action. (20 references) (GLR)

Documents large differences in the reading of function and content words and how these differences change with development. (FL)

Describes two experiments which assessed the ability of adult second language (L2) learners to produce and comprehend real, unreal, and past unreal English conditional sentences. Developmental differences are analyzed in relation to distinctive features. The analyses lend support to the explanatory power of markedness theory in explaining L2 acquisition. (Author/SED)

Describes a range of forms and functions expressed by "you know," as well as its use by women and men in a corpus of spontaneous speech. Interesting contrasts were found in the most frequent functions expressed by "you know" in female and male usage. (Author/SED)

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

Suggests that Slovene is acquiring a verb-second (V2) word order. Slovene is compared with Serbo-Croat to reveal diverged word order of these languages. Aspects of the history of the Germanic languages are examined for clues on current and possible future changes in Slovene. (Author/LMO)

Examines referential functions of demonstratives in Chinese discourse. Findings indicate that use of the zero-demonstrative in Chinese is the unmarked form of reference roughly corresponding to the referential function of "the" or "it" in English. Demonstratives in Chinese are a marked form of reference roughly corresponding to the referential function of demonstratives in English. (Author/CB)

An etymological comparison of Taiwanese words and their Mandarin equivalents revealed that 30 percent of words found in sampled running texts have different etymons, with a high percentage of same etymons between Taiwanese and Mandarin content words and a lower rate of same etymons between Taiwanese and Mandarin function words. (Author/CB)

Reveals striking differences between the characteristics of oral reading errors made to content and function words: Content word errors tended to be graphically similar but contextually unacceptable, whereas the reverse was true for function word errors. Argues that some errors are better viewed not as errors in word recognition but as postrecognition errors. (JD)

Employs a form-content theory to analyze usage of clitics in Spanish. A questionnaire (in Appendix) compares responses by English-dominant subjects to those of Spanish-dominant subjects. Results are compared with spontaneous production of clitics in the context of free conversations with 67 informants from the Caribbean area. (Author/LMO)

Discusses the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the contraction of prepositions and determiners in German to emphasize that the communicative function of certain syntactic forms can only be understood, and should therefore only be taught, within the framework of contextual analysis. (CB)

Explores the use of discourse anaphora in scientific abstracts and presents rules to be used for distinguishing anaphoric functioning of terms. The results of tests using these rules are reported, and the implications for natural language understanding, question answering, automatic extracting, query analysis, and bibliographic retrieval are discussed. (CLB)

The Spanish feminine article /el/, ordinarily the singular masculine definite article, has been used as evidence of the need for obligatory disagreement rules. Others explain the anamoly by means of referral rules. A third solution is suggested: an allomorphy rule which can be interpreted syntactically or phonologically. (LMO)

Given that the principal bounding nodes, or barriers, for subjacency are noun phrase (NP), S, and S-bar, with S optionally a barrier, NP and S-bar obligatorily barriers, differences between Greek and English WH-movement are discussed. The contrasts are derived from independently motivated differences in NP structure between the two languages. (Author/LMO)

In the frameword of generalized phrase-structure grammar, possessive clitics (POSS), bound words (BWs), and phrasal affixes (PAs) are analyzed. It is argued that English POSS should be treated as an edge-located inflectional affix, since POSS is suppressed in the presence of other Z affixes (plural, other possessives). (Author/LMO)

Four stories were divided into function word units; a dozen variables were all found to be statistically significant predictors of recall. For the more structured stories, subjects' intuitions, gist, and redundancy were the best predictors; for the less structured stories, serial position and repetition were best. (EJS)