Suggests a culture-independent analytical framework, based on natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author, to explore and analyze six Japanese culture-specific and culturally revealing concepts and show how the semantic metalanguage helps to make the concepts clear and facilitate better insight into Japanese culture and society. (102…

The authors present data from 2 feature verification experiments designed to determine whether distinctive features have a privileged status in the computation of word meaning. They use an attractor-based connectionist model of semantic memory to derive predictions for the experiments. Contrary to central predictions of the conceptual structure…

An analysis is made of three "wh" words -- what, which, and who -- which are most frequently used as interrogative and relative pronouns in English. An attempt is made to find some formal syntactic markers distinguishing these two uses and consequently to postulate distinct feature matrices for them. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

A study compared the instructional strategies of semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis with a traditional contextual approach for vocabulary acquisition. Subjects, 36 fourth, fifth, and six grade classes, were taught a set of 15 target words in each of the three instructional conditions for each of 3 weeks. Classes were assessed at the…

Revised Version of a paper presented at the 1973 TESOL Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (HW)

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)

Foreign language instruction, particularly the learning of new vocabulary, could greatly benefit from the structural description of semantic fields. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

The problems of measurement and type-formation are discussed in the light of two approaches toward systems of linguistic objects. First, they are discussed as gestalt systems; second, they are discussed in the light of systems of general type viewed as sets of collections of arbitrary distinctive features. (Author/RM)

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…

In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…

The author argues that a componential analysis of Russian case desinences is possible and useful, and that it consequently deserves a place in the linguistic analysis of Contemporary Standard Russian. The two basic assumptions of the author's theory are: first, that the meaning of cases reflects primarily the relation of substantives to the action…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…