ABSTRACT
Comparisons between languages continued to be part of our research. Relative clauses were studied in French, English, and Spanish (Ferreiro, Othenin-Girard, Chipman, & Sinclair, 1976), and deletion problems by Rappe du Cher in English, French, German and Turkish (in Sinclair et al., 1976), with the results showing similarities and differences across the various languages. At the time, we were mainly interested in the differences noted across languages when the lexical meaning but not the structure was changed. To advance these studies, the next step would be a re-examination of differences in the results obtained with sentences of identical meaning across languages, such re-examination to be undertaken in the light of recent developments in generative grammar and comparative linguistics (cf. Rizzi, 1989).
