Designed to index the kinds of meaning relationships that children perceive to exist between words and their references, this test consists of 276 pairs comprising 24 categories. For each item of the test, the subjects were asked to rank each pair of statements depending on how well they thought the words on the left were described. Content…

This paper identifies and describes three distinct variables on which prose passages can differ, from a linguistic point of view. Each of these variables relates to the way in which the content of prose is organized to convey meaning to the reader. The first variable is the position of information in a structure representing a passage's…

This study identified reasons to believe that one particular way of teaching writing is theoretically sound; explicated the use theory of meaning; defined a theory of rhetoric which was compatible with the use theory; presented a set of beliefs about the nature of thought and about how the mind learns; and presented exemplary classroom activities…

The purposes of this investigation were: (1) to analyze the critical writing achievement and the critical thinking achievement of groups of students of various abilities who received instruction in general semantics with similar groups of students who did not, (2) to determine if instruction in general semantics was equally effective for all…

The objective of this paper is to combine the viewpoint of model-theoretic semantics and generative grammar, to define semantics for context-free languages, and to apply the results to some fragments of natural language. Following the introduction in the first section, Section 2 describes a simple artificial example to illustrate how a semantic…

To determine whether the use of obscenities at college demonstrations creates negative hostile responses among the general population or positive and inclusive feelings toward the demonstrators, or both responses, interviews were conducted in the Denver Metropolitan area. An interview questionnaire was administered to 200 informants, 175…

The research contained in this report is directed at the problem of assessing structures of knowledge in science. Toward this end graduate as well as undergraduate students were asked to make judgments of the perceived similarity of expressions that mark or label concepts in the subject matter of physics. An apriori model of the structure of…

This book discusses the special jargon used by black people in the United States. In the first two chapters the author, a white man, discusses his personal experiences with the black community in order to establish an argument for the need for more awareness of what black jargon is and how it is used. Chapter three proposes that standard English…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the semantic relationships among common nouns obtained via two different measurement procedures and (2) determine if the use of these relationships to classify the various words results in differential degrees of learning when the stimuli are cast in terms of the paired-associate learning paradigm.…

This paper explains some properties and restrictions involved in phenomena of topicalization in Japanese. The first section reviews certain properties involved in simplex topical sentences; the second section reveals certain constraints on topicalization involved in complex sentences. Section Three pursues one consequence suggested by those…

Two vocabulary tasks--one production and one recognition--were compared with the expectation that the recognition task would yield better performance than the production task. The pairs of pictures used in the recognition task were divided into eight groups defined on target and distractor frequency and same-different conceptual category…

This paper examines possible interchanges between cognitive and language processes with particular attention given to concept formation and semantic language development. Aspects of psychological and contemporary linguistic theories are discussed as a way to interrelate the functions of thought and language. The author concludes that while…

An informal introduction to the study of communication deals with the major topics in the field. It presents basic theories of communication and language, reviews how language takes on meaning, explains the stimulus-response and Piaget theories of learning, and presents major theories dealing with communications and society. These theories include…

The discussion of Spanish verbs considers the problems of tense and aspect. Two tenses are used in the description: past and non-past. The past tense is considered the marked member and the non-past the unmarked member. Aspect is considered in terms of "telic" verbs which express an action tending towards a goal, and "atelic" verbs which do not…

The report presents a progress in theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, lexicography, and systems design in the development of a German-English Machine Translation System. Work in the theoretical group concentrated on intrasentenial disambiguation and on improving certain parts of the system to achieve greater economy in processing.…