This paper discusses the sense relation of synonymy, taking the view that this phenomenon should be understood as a gradual concept, a cline along which there are different degrees of synonymy. This view is consistent with the widely held opinion among semanticists that strict or absolute synonymy is rare in human language. A further step is taken…

To measure stereotypes of the 518 most common women's names along six dimensions (Good-Bad, Strong-Weak, Active-Passive, Sincere-Insincere, Intelligent-Dumb, and Calm-Emotional), this study administered the Osgood semantic differential to 250 male and 250 female college students. While previous research has been done on the first three of these…

A discussion of the animacy hierarchy in human discourse looks at the role of the hierarchy in three Western Austronesian languages: Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, and Rejang. Animacy corresponds to the degree of agency an entity has with a transitive verb as contrasted with the degree to which that entity may be the patient of a transitive verb. The…

A study was conducted to examine the data collected by previous researchers on the degree of helpfulness of natural contexts. In this study two schemes of context cue types were compared on the basis of their contribution to word meaning acquisition, and their relationship to other text and word properties was explored. Subjects were 352 children…

Papers are presented from a conference that dealt with the similarities and differences between first and second language learning, ways of assessing the relationships, methodological procedures, and implications for development of procedures for teaching language handicapped children. The papers are presented under the following headings: (1)…

Investigations were made of the development of (1) children's abilities to produce and interpret requests with nuances, and (2) the ability to identify requests as being "bossy" or "nice." In the first study, the development of children's ability to produce bossy and nice requests and the linguistic means by which they do so…

A syntactic and semantic analysis of the morpheme "kom" in the Hmong language and its place in sentence embedding is presented. Sample sentences of other researchers were compared with information found in folk tales and the resultant hypotheses were tested on native informants. The morpheme has been previously described as meaning the…

Research on the cognitive processes used in semantic priming has shown that the processing of a given stimulus is speeded by prior processing of a related stimulus as the result of automatic and/or effortful priming. To investigate the effect of age on semantic priming, two independent studies were conducted at Pomona College in California and at…

The major purpose of the three studies reported here was to investigate possible differences in agreement/disagreement with attitude statements as a function of their type (with regard to positivity/negativity) and personalism. In the first study, 90 students completed scales on energy conservation and on having good study habits. Agreement varied…

Treats the general linguistic aspect of Fillmore's theories. (RM)

Deals with problems encountered by English learners of French in learning to use nouns, articles and the present tense, and in using them together. A way to revise the presentation of the French noun-article system and to make the identification of nouns and articles easier is presented. (CLK)

The modal auxiliary system in both German and English is seen as a grammatical category (relative assertion) which stands in specific opposition to the absence of a modal in a sentence (factual assertion). (Available from North-Holland Publishing Co., P. O. Box 211, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.) (CHK)

Verb stems are classified according to the particular group of nouns they appear with. The system reflects a taxonomy of situations involving concrete objects. A verb is chosen according to the shape and number of the object, if it is sitting, falling, etc., and according to the speaker's intention. (SCC)

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)

Article investigated student self-perception and in an self evaluation process, interesting differences emerged between groups as to how they believed others saw them. (Author/RK)