The individual components of language -- on the semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels -- mean little or nothing as individual constructs. Language research must proceed according to a concept of linguistic structure which reflects the correlation of elements within and between levels of structure. (VM)

In an attempt to overcome the lack of natural means of communication between student and computer, this thesis addresses the problem of developing a system which can understand natural language within an educational problem-solving environment. The nature of the environment imposes efficiency, habitability, self-teachability, and awareness of…

Questions of reference, which occur in those situations in which the function or meaning of a name or description is at issue, cannot be answered by a purely semantic theory but need to be supported by aspects of a theory of pragmatics. This report investigates the implications of direct and indirect reference in language, concludes that a…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

This study investigates acquisition of two aspects of the meaning of color terms: semantic organization and reference. A longitudinal, repeated measure design was used, and data were collected from 33 subjects, 2 to 4 years old at first testing. Four tasks were used: one to assess semantic organization (the acquisition of the…

Reflexives in Japanese and English show a number of interesting differences. Morphologically, there is a single form "jibun" ("jishin") in Japanese, which does not vary for person or number. In English there are various forms which always agree in person and number ("myself,""himself,""themselves,"…

Methods of mapping cognitive structure were compared. Free and controlled word association tests and a tree-construction test were administered to graduate students. Very similar patterns of relations among words and graphic representations of these structures were produced. No agreement among the individual measures of concept interconnectedness…

Male students' (N=50) perceptions of counselors, counseling psychologists, and guidance counselors were compared by means of a semantic differential instrument. Counseling psychologists were perceived as being likely sources of help for emotional, family, interpersonal, and sexual problems. Counselors were perceived as more likely sources of help…

Self-concept questionnaire was shown to have high test-retest reliability, but only fair to moderate split-half (odd-even) reliability. Validity was adequate. The scale will serve as a heuristic device for family counselors who require a rapid assessment of a child's self-esteem. (Author)

The present study, by requiring subjects to decide whether the two words in a stimulus pair have the same or different meanings, is an attempt to measure the time necessary to encode a printed word into a representation of its meaning which is available for subsequent matching. (Author)

The theory is presented that there are in Indo-European languages only two comparative morphemes and correspondingly two degrees of the comparative, superiority and equality. (RM)

Discusses the study of colloquial Spanish in literary texts. Presents an annotated list of Spanish colloquial expressions extracted from "Paralelo 40" by Jose Luis Castillo-Puche. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

This article discusses the notion of the proposition in the philosophy of language. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

A discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs in Russian leads to the conclusion that the question of transitivity rests primarily with the meaning of the verb itself and with the resulting amenability to passive transformation. (Author/RM)