Let us consider two lists of Chinese words in Mandarin Chinese, the spoken National language. (In this article the writer is also the informant). According to their syntactic functions, we shall call the words in one of these lists “nouns”, and those in the other list “verbs”.

Examples of nouns are: gou ‘dogs’; ji ‘chickens’; wudz ‘rooms’; tsai ‘vegetables, dishes (of food)’ Examples of verbs are: jiau ‘bark, call’; chr ‘eat’; hei ‘dark, are dark’; tian ‘sweet, are sweet’. In Chinese, there are sentences consisting of a noun followed by a verb. We shall call the formula for such sentences S = N V. Examples are: gou jiau ‘Dogs bark.’; ji chr ‘Chickens eat.’; wudz hei ‘Rooms are dark.’; tsai tian ‘Vegetable are sweet; dishes (of food) are sweet.’. There are also parts of sentences in Chinese consisting of a verb followed by a noun. We shall call the formula for such “verb noun” sentence parts V N. Examples are: jiau gou ‘call dogs’; chr ji ‘eat chickens; hei wudz ‘darkrooms’; tian tsai ‘desserts’.

Dans l’espoir d’apporter un peu d’ordre aux “règles” des grammaires traditionnelles et de fournir aux étudiants étrangers une explication facilement assimilable des cadres les plus fréquents de la prose française, nous avons commencé a appliquer la méthode des substitutions à quelques problèmes de morphologie avec des résultats qui nous ont paru satisfaisants dans leur application pédagogique.

Au cours de l’exposé qui va suivre, nous nous appliquerons à découvrir la situation précise du mot de dans la structure essentielle du français moderne, c’est-à-dire sans tenir compte des effets stylistiques ni des tournures archaïques égarées dans la langue contemporaine.

Discussions of the testing of proficiency to write a foreign language are usually limited to techniques; and without a rationale or set criteria of what is to be tested, the result is confusion. Partly as a consequence of the lack of a rationale we are faced with a dearth of techniques in use. Essentially we find only two: objective short answer tests, which are distrusted, and composition tests, which are frustrating because of problems of scoring and the time involved.

Superficial clichés are freely applied to these two techniques. Judgments are made on outward appearances — face validity — without reference to linguistic content or to empirically tested validity. On the basis of appearance, objective tests are criticized because presumably (1) they do not force the student to think, (2) they do not require that the student organize and present information, (3) they are only recognition, multiple choice tests, (4) they are considered elementary in comparison with the business of writing a free composition in the foreign language.

Les notes que nous avons réunies dans le présent article sur le schwa en franco-canadien, ont été rédigées d’après des textes oraux enregistrés sur ruban magnétique. Ces textes constituent quatre contes de folklore du comté de Charlevoix, et ils représentent approximativement deux heures et demie de débit oral. Les sujets parlants sont des cultivateurs originaires de cette région de la province de Québec qui se situe à quelques 70 milles au nord-est de la ville de Québec, sur la rive nord du fleuve Saint-Laurent. Nous tenons à ajouter que la plupart des faits que nous signalerons ont été notés également dans le parler populaire, et à un moindre degré, dans le parler familier de la ville de Québec.

The following presentation shows the structural analysis of a Cree text in terms of tagmemic formula. The procedure, developed by K. L. Pike, and described in his Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, is based on the hypothesis that linguistic patterning is related to the patterning of all purposeful behavior. Crucial to the theory is the structural concept of slot-plus-class (of filler), which together comprise the tagmeme, i.e., the structurally relevant unit of grammatical arrangement.