This paper argues that we are moving toward a more experimental approach to language, one which is characterized less by introspective judgments and more by empirical evidence. The first section of the paper is a general discussion of the directions linguistic theories are taking. The second section discusses some of the fundamental problems…

The game "Giant Steps" was described. It was designed to aid children in the semantic development of verbs. The purpose of the experimental evaluation was to determine whether playing the game actually did influence the associative structure of those verbs and adverbs that are "guessed" words in the game. Third graders from two classrooms in an…

The author's stated purpose is to answer the questions: (1) Do auxiliary verbs exist in Spanish? If so, what are the characteristics which distinguish them as a class, and what specific verbs are included in that class? (2) Is there, in particular, a class of modal auxiliaries? If so, what are their defining characteristics, and what is the…

This fourth annual report summarizes the investigation of (1) a "sentence dictionary" and (2) a "word government dictionary" for use in automatic abstracting and extracting systems. The theory behind the sentence dictionary and its compilation is that a separation of significant from nonsignificant sentences can be accomplished on the basis of…

A formal grammatical system is described in which the lexicon plays a central role. A distinguishing feature of this system is its departure from the priniciple of monocategorial lexical attachment, that is, it permits many-one translations by the lexical attachment component from syntactic categories to morphemes. In this system the underlying…

This paper is concerned primarily with the structure of language and how knowledge about this structure can lead to improved automated information retrieval. The paper discusses developments in linguistics and the application of linguistics to information retrieval, especially fact retrieval and indexing. For fact retrieval it is proposed that…

An experiment was conducted to gain insight into the demarcative function of stress and intonation by testing the effectiveness of these features in resolving structural ambiguity. The responses of native speakers were analyzed both in the production and in the recognition of 68 pairs of potentially ambiguous sentences. Special care was taken to…

One hundred sixty-eight books, articles, and dissertations written between 1960 and 1973 are listed in this bibliography of linguistic studies of the Spanish language within the grammatical theory originated by Noam Chomsky in his "Syntactic Structures" (1957). The present work is divided into two general categories: (1) phonology and (2) syntax…

This study was designed to investigate children's ability to use semantic syntax in connection with two types of meanings of polysemantic words. One hundred fourth graders ranked the familiarity of multiple definitions of 60 words given in a semantic survey. Those 34 words found to have common meanings or obscure meanings were used to construct a…

Progress is reported at the 1,000,000 word level on the development of a partial syntatic analysis technique for indexing text. A new indexing subroutine for hyphens is provided. New grammars written and programmed for Machine Aided Indexing (MAI) are discussed. (ED 069 290 is a related document) (Author)

A charge is made that the traditional classification of the Latin verb system into six tenses in the indicative mood (present, future, future perfect, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect) is incorrect since it unduly stresses application of the term "tense." Ensuing discussion centers around grammatical aspect as signaled by the form of a verb…

While the prenominal or postnominal position of descriptive adjectives in Spanish has been widely discussed, there is a partial aspect of this topic which is either ignored or dealt with in a perfunctory manner, namely, the possible existence of a semantic principle determining the sequence of descriptive adjectives in coordinate series of two or…

The "rhythmic group" in French (noun group or verb group) is described with examples. The aim is to find some relation between the morphophonological phenomena such as "liaison" occurring within such rhythmic groups and the syntactic structure of French. Available from Liber Laeromedel, Box 1205, S-22105 Lund, Sweden. (TL)

The inadequacy of the use of the linguist's introspective judgments of meaning and grammaticality as a basis for language studies in syntax and semantics is described, as is the need for improved methods. The evaluation of alternative methodologies by replication experiments is explored. (Author/RM)

Language samples were gathered for 12 normal children (two to five years old) representing a range of linguistic levels in a clinic setting with unstructured clinician-child interaction, and the home setting with unstructured mother-child interaction. (Author)