This book discusses the act of understanding in mathematics. The first chapter, "Understanding and Meaning," inquires into the various senses and uses of the word "understanding" in ordinary language and discusses the notion of meaning and relations between understanding and meaning. The second chapter, "Components and…

The working papers in this volume, written by staff and advanced students of the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of North Dakota, include the following: "The Antigone Constraint" (David Tuggy); "Clause Types in Southeastern Tepehuan" (Thomas L. Willett); "Sentence Components in Southeastern Tepehuan"…

This study focused on the acquisition of the dative verb by Chinese learners of English as a Second Language. The study proposes that the learner acquires basic semantic structure for the double-object dative via the "near universal linking rules that map thematic roles to syntactic positions. On semantic grounds, the learner might then use…

An experiment involving 20 graduate and undergraduate students (7 males and 13 females) at West Virginia University (Morgantown) assessed "fan network structures" of recognition memory. A fan in network memory structure occurs when several facts are connected into a single node (concept). The more links from that concept to various…

The structure of complementation in complex predicates in Korean has attracted configurational analysis. Using a lexical functional grammar (LFG) framework, this paper examines the structure of complementation in complex predicates. The term "predicate" in this context is used to describe both verbs and adjectives that are assumed to…

A number of Seri verbs display a sensitivity to whether a goal, which is a term used for recipients, adressees, etc., is singular or plural. The data presented in this paper are of typological interest. It is argued that Seri has indirect objects, but that there is no one-to-one mapping between the semantic role goal and either the syntactic…

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…