In English and Chinese, questions with a "wh"-object and a universally quantified subject (e.g. "What did everyone buy?") allow an individual answer ("Everyone bought apples.") and a pair-list answer ("Sam bought apples, Jo bought bananas, Sally bought..."). By contrast, the pair-list answer is reportedly unavailable in Japanese and Korean. This…

Reports on an experiment conducted on 23 Israeli kindergarteners and 16 Israeli college students, which used a variant of a semantic differential test in order to test the hypothesis that young Israeli children, like adults, ascribe sexual meanings to words without regard to grammatical gender. (Author/AM)

A study explored the meanings of democracy held by teachers and students in each of the three types of secondary schools in an emerging democracy (the Czech Republic) by locating the meaning in multi-dimensional semantic space. Data were collected during 2 months of fieldwork conducted in the Czech Republic during the fall of 1997. Students and…

THIS DOCUMENT COMPRISES REPORTS ON TWO TECHNIQUES USED IN SIX EXPERIMENTS DESIGNED TO ASSESS THE SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF AUDITORY, LINGUISTIC INPUTS. PAST RESEARCH HAS DEVELOPED THE "PROBE-LATENCY TECHNIQUE," THE FIRST OF THE TWO TECHNIQUES USED IN THIS RESEARCH, FOR ASSESSING THE STRUCTURE OF LINGUISTIC INPUTS. RESULTS TO…

SEMANTIC DISCRIMINATION OF POLYSEMOUS ENTRY WORDS IN BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES WAS DISCUSSED IN THE PAPER. HANDICAPS OF PRESENT BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES AND BARRIERS TO THEIR FULL UTILIZATION WERE ENUMERATED. THE AUTHOR CONCLUDED THAT (1) A BILINGUAL DICTIONARY SHOULD HAVE A DISCRIMINATION FOR EVERY TRANSLATION OF AN ENTRY WORD WHICH HAS SEVERAL…

In this paper, the author examines the confusion that currently exists concerning the term "physical education." In particular, he analyzes the claim that"physical education" is a "family resemblance" term--a word or phrase which may be used to denote fundamentally different concepts, but concepts in which there is some overlapping of…

Suggests that grammar is not something into which words are plugged but is rather a mechanism by which words are served and that linguistics scientists must begin to devote a major part of their attention to lexicology. (TO)

Study determined that complex sentences are recalled better if the described events within a sentence are presented in the same sequence as their correct temporal order''; the use of active vs. passive voice was not a factor in remembering the semantic content. (Author/SP)

Presents the definitions and evolution of 18 words recently coined. (DD)

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)

Article omission is known to be a feature of early grammar, although it does not affect all child languages to the same extent. In this article we analyze the production of articles by 12 children, 4 speakers of Catalan, 4 speakers of Italian, and 4 speakers of Dutch. We consider the results in the light of (i) the adult input the children are…

A theoretical distinction is made between the growth of word meaning and the development of word sense in Vygotsky's terms. A recall from semantic memory task and the semantic differential were used to operationalize these two conceptions of meaning in a study of 72 children aged 5 to 10 years. Results replicated typical findings for the growth of…

An experiment is reported which was based on the use of judgments of perceived likelihood to study semantic constraints. Results of the experiment are discussed. (Author/RM)

A study is reported in which generic assertions, based on inductive and deductive evidence providing varying degrees of support, were presented to subjects for acceptance or rejection. The results show that generalization power (probability of generic agreement) is influenced primarily by inherent verb characteristics. (Author/RM)

Evidence is presented to support the claim that a semantic theory adequate to capture linguistic intuitions must provide semantic representations corresponding to all possible scope relationships and that an active sentence and the corresponding passive will receive different preferred interpretations. (Author/AM)