Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

A symposium on discourse analysis and language learning is summarized. Discourse analysis can be divided into six fields of research: syntax, the amount of syntactic organization required for different types of discourse, large speech events, intra-sentential cohesion in text, speech acts, and unequal power discourse. Research on speech events and…

Language samples were gathered from two children, from several weeks after the first birthday of each child to the beginning of the child's two-word period (approximately 10 months). The children were observed and videotaped every two weeks, to obtain 33 continuous minutes of tape. Analyses focused on the question of whether or not the child uses…

A set of six conditions for critically analyzing proposals in the various areas of language acquisition is developed and justified. These conditions are then applied to theoretical proposals in language acquisition literature. Proposals in the following areas are discussed and evaluated: (1) phonological development, (2) early lexical development,…

Some results are reported of an investigation into the meanings of the English modal auxiliary verbs. The corpus consisted of the one million word Brown University corpus of American English and a matching Lancaster University corpus of British English. The three factors operative in the study were: (1) contextual features, that is, co-occurring…

Limitations of linguistic theories of translation are outlined and an argument is presented for the inclusion of an evaluation component in a comprehensive theory of translation. The tasks which a linguistic theory of translation sets for itself are formulated since these provide an ad hoc set of criteria for testing the adequacy of the various…

THIS TRANSLATION FROM THE RUSSIAN IS THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH GRAMMAR OF OSSETIC TO BE PUBLISHED IN A WESTERN LANGUAGE SINCE 1903. THE PRESENT WORK IS ACTUALLY A COMPOSITE OF TWO WORKS BY MR. ABAEV WHICH APPEARED IN 1952 AND 1959 AND WERE TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY GABOR HORVATH, STEVEN P. HILL, AND HERBERT H. PAPER AS ONE OF A SERIES OF TRANSLATIONS…

THIS VOLUME PRESENTS THE LINGUISTIC MATERIAL ASSEMBLED BY THE AUTHORS (MUCH OF IT AT FIRST HAND) IN THE COURSE OF THEIR CLASSIFICATION OF THE NON-BANTU LANGUAGES OF NORTHEASTERN AFRICA. THIS MATERIAL, DEALING MAINLY WITH MORPHEMES AND GRAMMATICAL AND SYNTACTIC BEHAVIOR, INCLUDES DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING LANGUAGES--MORU-MANGBETU,…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…

A distinction is drawn between pragmatic and semantic meaning and a supporting discussion is presented. The hypothesis is then stated, that there are cases where semantic meaning of an utterance is learned as an abstraction from pragmatic meaning. Data from two experiments on a group of 63 preschool children are presented which provide empirical…

This document reviews some of the indices of language development which have been constructed since the Anderson study of 1937. In addition to the findings of Anderson, the T-unit proposed by Hunt (1965), the measure of T-unit length and mean number of sentence-combining transformations per T-unit developed by O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris…

This article offers a new definition of the concept of auxiliaries, based on the conviction that auxiliarity is a grammatical function rather than a semantic, logical or metaphorical one. Examples are taken from Spanish. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Deals with selected aspects of traditional Amhara verbal behavior from an ethnographic point of view. (CLK)

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)