The Agnate Sentences Test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship between sentences that are similar in semantic content but different in syntactic structure. In this study, developmental differences in the ability to decode written syntax are observed by means of this test which was administered to 63 4th graders, 65 8th graders,…

Translation may be compared to a cable composed of many simultaneous strands of transfer. In translation, there is replacement which involves general hierarchical organization, grammatical constructions and constituents, mapping of deep onto surface structures, classes, ordering, lexicon, phonology, concordance, points of ambiguity, and…

This study was conducted to examine the acquisition of the meaning of the temporal conjunctions "before" and "after." The initial hypothesis was that in the acquisition of a word, the child learns its semantic components one at a time. The subjects were 40 school children attending the Bing Nursery School at Stanford…

Spanish verbs pose contextual problems for the non-native speaker in his use of the subjunctive, reflexives, and pronouns. The semantic range and syntactic contexts of many common verbs are usually treated and learned very unsystematically. One ordinarily seeks answers to contextual questions from a dictionary, but dictionaries do not provide…

This study reflects the author's efforts to synthesize ideas drawn from various linguistic theorists, especially Schlesinger, Chomsky, and Fillmore. The first section gives the theoretical background for the study. The second section discusses roles, relations, and constructs. The final section discusses the applications of the study to teaching…

This volume, dedicated to Professor Robert B. Lees on the occasion of his departure from the University of Illinois, contains 15 papers on a variety of linguistic topics: C. L. Baker, "Problems of Polarity in Counterfactuals"; Lawrence F. Bouton, "Do So: Do+Adverb"; Chin-chuan Cheng, "Domains of Phonological Rule Application"; Joseph F. Foster,…

To determine the effects of instruction in general semantics on the critical thinking of secondary students, 104 tenth- and eleventh-grade students in control and experimental groups completed the "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" test before and after the 12-week teaching period, in which two teachers spent 1 hour per week in the…

The oral reading miscues of 18 proficient readers, six each from grades 2, 4, and 6, were divided into those which did not change syntactic structure (nontransformation miscues) and those which did (retransformation miscues) and were analyzed through the use of the Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues. The two groups of miscues were compared with…

The purpose of this study was to develop a semantic differential scale based on achievement motivation concepts by which grade point averages could be predicted. A scale was constructed and administered to 944 freshmen at Northeastern State College in Fall 1967. Two approaches were used. One was to combine semantic differential scale scores…

This volume, the first of three dealing with a number of investigations and studies into the formal structure, advanced technology and application of large scale information processing systems, is concerned with the areas of compiler languages, natural languages and information storage and retrieval. The first report is entitled "Semantics and…

This report gives the results obtained in the semantic and syntactic analysis of the Japanese particles "de,""ni,""e," and "wo" in comparison to their equivalents in English, German, and Spanish. The study is based on the so-called "Correlational Analysis" as proposed by Ernst von Glaserfeld. The…

The emotional states of an adult male American speaker, as reflected in 30 utterances, were evaluated by 12 subjects on nine 7-point semantic differential scales. The subjects also evaluated the utterances on similar scales for pitch, loudness, and speed. Significant correlations were found between some acoustic variables and the judgments of some…

At present a computer system cannot be constructed for handling the totality of a natural language in any significant way. It is, however, possible to construct a system for communication in a narrow field of discourse. A working model for a specialized discourse based on a recognition grammar is discussed. Some properties of the recognition…

In order to mechanize the processing of natural language, the linguist must make the machine interpret the meaning, or semantic content of the language, in some way or other. This means that the machine should extract not only syntactic but also semantic information from the source sentence through the analysis of it. In this paper, the authors…

It was hypothesized that by age 8 children would manifest an adult meaning system, and that 5-year-old children would not. An adult meaning system allows an adult to transcend component word meanings and integrate, in the presence of a speaker, the underdetermined and the factual proposition into a meaningful whole. Subjects were 60 5- and…