Students learn, understand, and retain knowledge best when they discover it themselves. In the area of semantics, the study of how meaning is conveyed through language, explicit knowledge may appear to be obvious once it becomes conscious, but unless people are explicitly aware of their implicit knowledge and assumptions, they may be at their…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

Racist language is more pervasive than sexist language. Not only are there obvious racial slurs, but also most English black and black-oriented words have negative meanings. One study found over 134 synonyms for whiteness, 44 of which were favorable, and only 10 had any semblance of negative connotations. In the same study, 120 synonyms for…

The concept of cognitive egocentrism is presented, supported with experimental evidence, and operationally defined on a scale of egocentric distance from "ego" ("speaker") to "hearer," to "other," to "concrete entity." This concept is used in evaluating the hypothesis that the nominative case in…

The varied forms and semantic factors of Japanese ordinal expressions are related to one another in a coherent system. In Japanese, the cardinal number form is a numeral compound in construction with a referent. The numeral compound consists of a number and a numeral adjunct. Numeral adjuncts are derived from bound forms, or numeral suffixes, and…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…

Spanish verbs pose contextual problems for the non-native speaker in his use of the subjunctive, reflexives, and pronouns. The semantic range and syntactic contexts of many common verbs are usually treated and learned very unsystematically. One ordinarily seeks answers to contextual questions from a dictionary, but dictionaries do not provide…

A context-sensitive, generative lexical rule model is developed that is capable of overcoming the insufficiencies of both the transformationalist and the lexicalist approaches to work formation, e.g., semantic-syntactic asymmetry, metaphoric usage, and restricted rule productivity. (DB)

Discusses the rules governing the usage of the indefinite article in Spanish. (HP)

There is more to the process of paraphrasing than simple transliteration. A variety of paraphrase types exist, each using a different strategy and requiring a different interpretive approach. (MSE)

Compares the use of the English verbs "say" and "tell" and the Hebrew verbs "amar" and "siper" and then examines the degree of correspondence between "say" and "amar" and between "tell" and "siper." (CB)

Examines the nonstandard constructions in Caipira Portuguese, a dialect spoken in southeastern Brazil, which illustrate a tendency to reduce morphological redundancy at the noun phrase level. This is accomplished by restricting plural markers to only one of the elements of the noun phrase--not the noun, as might be expected, but, rather, one its…

An often-neglected aspect of daily language is syllable doubling or repetition, as in infant language ("nounou"), onomatopoeia ("ronron"), interjections or responses ("oui oui"), names ("Mimi"), or military slang ("coco" for "commandant"). The mechanisms and semantic functions of this phenomenon are outlined, drawing on examples from French…

Points out that children must master a great deal of information about form classes, written conventions, and word referent relationships in order to understand what teachers mean when they use the term "word." (FL)