A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

A polemic is made for frame semantics and the linguistic phenomenon of anaphoric reference without noun phrase (NP) antecedent is examined within this frame. Non-syntactic anaphora is that which does not point out into the real world but rather points back into the discourse in a frame which has been built up between the speaker and hearer in a…

Criteria for defining individual members of the preposition word class are set forth. Arguments are presented against calling prepositions meaningless, yet it is conceded and explained that those which occur in wider contexts are vaguer due to their greater variability. The unitary, polysemous, and/or homonymous nature of prepositions are…

The following articles on syntax and semantics were researched at the Harvard Syntax Workshop: (1) "Clause Reduction in Spanish," by Judith Aissen and David Perlmutter; (2) "Reduced WH-Questions," by Robin Bechhofer; (3) "Reduction in Conjoined WH-Questions," by Robin Bechhofer; (4) "On Subject-to-Object Raising…

Eye movement data were collected for 28 college students reading 32 sentences with sentence verification questions. The factors observed were target sentence voice (active/passive), probe voice, and correct response (true/false). Pairs of subjects received the same set of stimuli, but with agents and objects in the sentences reversed. As expected,…

THE CREATION OF AN INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM OF MACHINE TRANSLATION WITH AUTOMATIC INDEXING OF THE TRANSLATED MATERIALS PRESUMES THE DEVELOPMENT OF DICTIONARIES WHICH PROVIDE FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF KEY WORDS AND WORD COMBINATIONS, FOLLOWED BY THEIR TRANSLATION INTO THE DESCRIPTORS OF THE SEARCH LANGUAGE. THREE SIGNS WHICH SHOW THAT A GIVEN WORD IS A…

THESE 14 PAPERS EMPHASIZE THE VARIETY OF CURRENT THOUGHT ABOUT RHETORIC AND THE EXTENT TO WHICH MODERN RHETORIC IS EXPLOITING NEW INFORMATION AND RESEARCH. THE EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION DEFINES THE RECENTLY REVIVED ART OF RHETORIC IN TERMS OF ITS PURPOSES AND TYPES, AND THE PAPERS THEMSELVES DEMONSTRATE THAT MUCH OF WHAT IS NOW HERALDED AS NEW IN THE…

THE NOUN PHRASE IN HEBREW IS DESCRIBED IN TERMS OF ITS "TRANSFORMATIONAL" HISTORY. THE NOUN PHRASES OF HEBREW ARE CLASSIFIED ON THE BASIS OF TYPES OF ADJACENT, OR MODIFYING STRUCTURES WITHIN THE NOUN PHRASE. GRAMMATICAL RULES ARE FORMULATED TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS OF SENTENCE AMBIGUITY, THE RELATIONS BETWEEN CERTAIN SENTENCE STRUCTURES, AND…

Developmental differences in preschool children's abilities to communicate about basic and subordinate level semantic contrasts were examined in a referential communication situation. Twenty-four three, four, and five-year-old children communicated with children of the same age and adults about pictures' referents. Speakers talked about one…

Techniques of teaching the English finite verb to speakers of other languages must account for meaning that is signalled by the structure alone and meaning derived from the context. Accordingly, this study attempts to distinguish the semantic components of the finite verb structure. The structure is viewed as being always composed of the following…

This paper 1) discusses the problems encountered in preparing objectives for instructional programs; 2) describes an informal research project in which seven instructional designers working on the same project attempted to determine agreement on an objective; and 3) suggests how to prepare objectives so that difficulties can be minimized. One…

This research examines how semantic information influences syntactic parsing decisions during sentence processing. In the first experiment, subjects were presented lexical strings having syntactically identical surface structures but with two possible underlying structures: "The children taught by the Berlitz method," and "The…

This paper looks into the question of the relationship between language and thought, and in particular, various theories advanced by Soviet psychologists. These theories are to be viewed within the context of the Soviet ideological legacy which proclaims that ideas do not exist apart from language. The current Soviet position can be summarized as…

Two groups of preschoolers and one of young grade-schoolers were tested for their comprehension of presuppositions and negation in complex syntax. Four types of sentences were presented: affirmative and negative versions of sentences with factive main predicates (which presuppose the truth of the proposition of the complement clause) and with…

To provide an authority on usage, this book presents an analysis of the treatment of American English as it appears in a number of dictionaries and usage guides. The first chapter presents brief sketches of the usage guides and studies that provided the basis for this compilation and discusses the organization of the book. After a resume of the…