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A study examined the acquisition order of English article functions, and attempts to explain the results in terms of transfer and language universals. Subjects were French, German, Japanese, and Korean students, aged 10-15 years, studying English as a second language in schools in Seoul, Korea. All were administered a test consisting of 18 multiple-choice questions, 16 error-correction items, and 19 composition questions. Each item had a context description in the student's native language, intended to elicit a particular article function. Article functions were classified in six categories: deictic reference; exophoric reference; anaphoric reference; non-specific reference; generic reference; and nominative function. It was found, as anticipated, that the French and German students, whose first language has an article system, earned higher scores than the Japanese and Korean students. It was also found that the acquisition order of English article functions was similar regardless of the existence of an article system in the native language. In all groups, functions of "the" appeared to be acquired in this order: deictic reference; anaphoric reference; then exophoric reference. Acquisition of functions of "a" shows a slightly different order according to group background conditions. Contains 22 references. (Author/MSE)

Studies have indicated that agrammatical aphasics tend to better realize morphemes with a high level of semantic value. A study sought to examine the effect of the variation of the information content of the article on its comprehension by the aphasic. The appropriate and the significant nature of the function words "the" and "a" were varied with relation to the extralinguistic context to see whether these distinctions would be noted by the aphasic. Eighteen aphasics were studied: 4 Broca, 5 Wernicke, 5 mixed anterior, and 5 anomic. Three members of the laboratory staff served as a control. Drawings containing 3 figures, 2 sharing a color and 2 sharing a shape, were shown. A tape gave instructions, with 8 possibilities, to: "Press the/a/white/black/round/square one." The following conditions resulted: (1) inappropriate article plus definite adjective, (2) appropriate article plus non-definite adjective, (3) inappropriate article plus definite adjective, and (4) inappropriate article plus non-definite adjective. It is concluded that articles are not normally informative in English, and therefore do not lend themselves to this type of analysis. Because English does not provide the means to vary systematically the informative content of the article, it was not possible to elicit correlated variation in responses. (AM)

In this study, the use of the preposition "pour" (for) in Ontario French is analyzed: (1) in its use with the verb "payer" (to pay for), and (2) in its durative meaning. Data come from the written and spoken French of three groups of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from the ninth and twelfth grade. In the written and spoken usage of these students, "pour" is used significantly differently than for a corresponding group of monolingual French speakers. A detailed analysis of the French prepositions "pour,""durant" (during), "pendant" (while), and the English preposition "for," reveals difficulty in determining whether the non-standard usage of the Franco-Ontarian students is due to interference from English or to an overgeneralization of French usage rules. (Author/CLK)

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered superior to the traditional explanation of the erosive effect of phonological change, and to the postulation of a metacondition responsible for the proliferation of free-standing segments rather than bound morphemes. First of all it is shown that Old English and Modern English are structurally more similar than has traditionally been assumed, that changes evident in Modern English can be traced from the earliest documentations of Old English. It is further shown that the answer cannot be found within the history of English, but rather, that the independent but parallel developments which take place in related languages are due to the structural features of the protolanguage, in this case, the Indo-European protolanguage. Finally it is shown that, while word-order change is not the sole cause of syntactic changes, it can be called upon to relate many diachronic developments which have until now defied explanation. (Author/AM)

As may be seen from data collected during language observations of four children over a period of two and a half years, children's sentences are not simply flawed versions of adult counterparts, but seem to result from a different grammar. These data indicate that logical formatives, such as "even," and "only," are sentence-initial constituents. They also point to interesting relationships between the structure of children's sentences with logical formatives and that of their negative and interrogative sentences. Children's understanding of these sentences appears to follow from a combination of phonological, syntactic, and lexical information. (JM)

This study examines the usage of preposition "pour" in the written and spoken French of two groups of Grade 9 and 12 Franco-Ontarian bilingual students from Welland and from the Sudbury area. Both the students' written and spoken French are shown to include a substantial proportion of constructions with "pour" which deviate from formal Franco-Ontarian French. A comparison of the French of the Franco-Ontarian students with that of unilingual francophone Quebeckers indicates that these constructions are typical of Franco-Ontarian French and may be partly attributed to interference from the English language. (Author)

Thirty informants were presented with sets of clauses punctuated as in the pattern "S1. If S2. S3" and asked which clause, S1 or S3, the "if" clause modified. Independently, several linguists judged the sentences "S1, if S2" and "S2, if S3" acceptable. Missing intonational clues or improper punctuation, which frequently occurs in advertising, could force a processing grammar to disambiguate the qualification in the above. Semantic data alone prove insufficient for this disambiguation process; anaphoric and temporal relationships will serve to disambiguate in such cases, but are not always present. If Strawson's "Indirectness Condition" is elaborated by examining the types of non-truth-functional relationships leading from the antecedent to the consequent, a hierarchy which predicts the informants' selections is established. This pragmatic hierarchy, causal/pseudo-causal/inductive/inductive and deductive/deductive, would aid the processing of potentially ambiguous clasuses. It is claimed that the same hierarchy could be applied to disambiguate sentences of the forms "S1. If S2. S3." Further, it is claimed that this hierarchy applies within a generative grammar to limit the acceptability of conjoining arbitrary sentences with "if." (Author/TL)

A number of errors which typify the English speech or writing of Egyptian students of EFL (English as a foreign language) were identified. A series of matched sentences -- some containing a deviant feature, others not -- were recorded by a native speaker of English and by a native speaker of Arabic. Groups of intermediate and of advanced EFL students listened to tape recordings and rated each sentence in terms of prescriptive grammaticality and social acceptability. Listeners were then presented with the subset of deviant sentences. They were asked to correct the errors and to indicate the extent to which each of the errors bothered or irritated them. Thus, it was possible to examine listeners' reactions to various types of errors and to map out the hierarchy of acceptability of various deviant utterances produced by native and non-native speakers. (Author/CLK)

First grade students practiced reading ten unfamiliar function words; half studied the words embedded in printed sentences and half studied the words in unstructured lists and then listened to sentences comprised of the words. Posttest measures revealed that those who studied the sentences learned more about the syntactic/semantic identities of function words, whereas those who studied the lists remembered the orthographic identities of the words better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in isolation. The findings show that there are multiple aspects of printed words to be learned by beginning readers, and that the aspect that gets learned depends upon how the words are practiced. These results lend support to the theory of printed word learning in which various identities of words become amalgamated in lexical memory as a consequence of reading experiences with the words. (Author/FL)

Errors made by Finnish university students in the use of the English article were analyzed using two types of error analyses: a traditional type of error analysis to provide an overall view of the errors found in students' compositions; and a multiple-choice test devised on the basis of the findings and shortcomings of the first test. With the first test, the number of correct responses are unknown, but with the second test, the errors are compared with the correct uses of the article. For the first test, data were collected from literature examination answers provided by 90 students of English from all levels of study. The second test was given to 45 first-year students of English, and test items chiefly represented generic and unique references, as well as other frozen uses of the article. Errors are described in terms of: (1) the total number of errors classified according to linguistic categories, (2) hierarchy of difficulty based on relative frequencies in test two, (3) errors classified according to the strategies employed by students, and (4) hierarchy of difficulty based on the strategies employed by the students. Strategies included omission of "a" and "the," addition of "a" and "the,""a" instead of "the," and "the" instead of "a." Defects in the present teaching system and suggestions for improvement are offered based on the findings. (SW)

Children's use of conjunctions was examined for linguistic complexity, developmental differences, and ethnic differences. Third, sixth, and ninth grade Anglo-American, Black, and Hispanic students completed sentence fragments ending in "and,""but,""because," and "even though." These conjunctions can be paired "and-but" and "because-even though," thereby making the second member of each pair the negative of the first. The positive member of each pair proved to be easier to master than the negative one, with the overall order of difficulty (from easiest to hardest) being because-and-but-even though. This order of difficulty was constant across grades and ethnic groups. All ethnic groups showed improvement in the use of conjunctions between third and ninth grades; but Anglo-American students achieved effective mastery of each conjunction earliest, while Hispanic students achieved mastery latest. (Author/RL)

A comprehensive analysis of English "as" clauses in terms of distribution and interpretation is offered. It is hypothesized that "as" clauses provide a supplementary explanation to the head noun (adnominal "as" clauses) and provide the propositional content of the main clauses (sentential "as" clauses.) "As" clauses, whether they seem to function as adnominal or sentential, should be regarded as adverbial clauses. (Contains 19 references.) (JP)

A study of the effect of function words on reading comprehension had as subjects 99 college students of English as a second language (ESL) divided into four groups. The treatment was the reading of a set of passages, written in four versions. In version 1 all function words were deleted; in version 2 function words with semantic weight were retained; in version 3 the same number of function words were retained as in version 2, but were randomly selected; and in version 4 the full text was used. Comprehension of the passages was measured by a multiple choice comprehension test. Results showed no significant difference between the comprehension scores yielded by versions 2 and 4 or between those of 1 and 3. However, the scores for versions 2 and 4 were significantly higher than for 1 and 3, indicating that function words carrying a semantic load contribute to reading comprehension for ESL students while those that are lexically empty, although essential for grammatical correctness, do not contribute to reading comprehension for this population. (Author/MSE)

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being acquired. The examination focused on the nominal reference system characterized by plurifunctionality and syncretism. Data were drawn from two cross-sectional studies of bilingual immigrant children in West Berlin in which the sociopolitical setting is considered along with the psycholinguistic investigation. The age groups were 8-15 years and 5-12 years. Monolingual German and Turkish control groups were used in the second study. The children's production of definite and indefinite markers during lengthy interviews using a variety of psycho- and sociolinguistic methodologies was analyzed. The data suggest that, while the individual learner's approach to plurifunctional items is systematic, individual interlanguage systems differ from each other. Further research into the points at which the various functions of plurifunctional items become the focus for individual learners is recommended. (MSE)

A comparison of the usage of English articles and prepositions by native speakers of Finnish and of Finland-Swedish studied the word frequencies of these grammatical categories in three levels of English essays written by school-leavers in Finnish-language and Swedish-language schools in Finland. It was hypothesized that the poorest essays written by Finnish-speakers would show lower frequencies in the use of English articles and of prepositions where simple one-to-one correspondences are difficult to establish. The frequencies of these words were expected to rise somewhat in intermediate essays and to rise to almost native-speaker level in the good essays. Because Finland-Swedish is grammatically closer to English, the figures for Finland-Swedish learners were expected to be higher than those of the Finns at the lower levels, but the figures for the best essays were not expected to differ very much. One hundred fifty essays on three levels of proficiency written by Finnish-speaking and the same number written by Swedish-speaking students were chosen to test the hypothesis. The data supported that hypothesis. It is concluded that the pattern of learning articles and prepositions in English where there are no easily established Finnish equivalents represents an avoidance by the students of linguistic features that are absent in the first language and perhaps considered redundant by the learner at early stages. The process should be considered a lack of transfer rather than indirect negative transfer of knowledge from the first language to the second. (MSE)

The classes and class members of function words are examined in detail in this paper in order to determine those which are most basic and most important to comprehension at the kindergarten through first-grade level. Noun determiners and pronouns, verbal determiners, and prepositions were found to be of importance, as were a small number of conjunctions and interrogators. It was concluded, however, that the first studies of the conceptual basis of language at the kindergarten through first-grade level should be directed toward problems of semantics and reference in pronouns and verb auxiliaries. (JM)

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the development of the use and understanding of locative and temporal prepositions in 94 children aged from 18 months to 8 years. The research was carried out as part of the Project "Language Development in Pre-School Children," directed by Gordon Wells, at the University of Bristol, School of Education. The research represents an attempt to integrate the theoretical and methodological orientations of linguistic semantics and Piagetian theory in the study of the acquisition of a limited domain of word-meanings. Detailed analyses are presented of particular strategies utilized by children at various ages and stages of development in the comprehension and production of spatial and temporal relational terms. It is suggested that such strategies result from specific interactions between the developing systems of language, cognition and perception, the overall forms of which are determined by the socio-cultural context of the use of the relational terms. In conclusion, partial critiques are presented of one-sided applications of semantic features theories and Piagetian theory in previous explanations of the acquisition of spatial and temporal relational terms. (Author)

Points out that "pro"-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of "pro" not found with the overt pronomials of non-"pro"-drop languages. Notes that while the overt pronouns of non-"pro"-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, "pro" may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. (24 references) (Author/CK)