Discusses study designed to show how a modified version of Jackendoff's lexical redundancy rules may be used to describe French verb function in a dictionary. Examines inconsistencies in use of terms "transitive" and "intransitive." (Author/BK)

It is suggested that four developmental terms (period, phase, stage, level) can be distinguished as different combinations of four criterial elements, and they should be differentiated according to whether or not they refer to (1) a part of a progression, (2) a recurrent state or event, (3) quantitative change, and (4) qualitative change.…

Examines use of modal auxiliary "should" when used to express probability as a weaker equivalent of "must." Study shows that in order to account for restrictions on use of "must" and "should," a theory must go beyond the syntactic and semantic characteristics and take into account semantic relations between…

Describes Japanese verbs of dress from viewpoints of contrastive analysis and intralingual sense relations. Focuses attention on semantic interest of this area to vocabulary in different languages and to importance of sense relation of oppositeness using "to put on" and "to take off" as examples. (Author/BK)

Presents study of use of English 'except' and 'except for.' Concludes 'except' and 'except for' can be used to mean 'with the exception of,' but when it is used to mean 'if it were not for' only 'except for' can be used. Also, it is not advisable to begin a sentence with 'except' unless it is followed by 'for.' (Author/BK)

Argues that the most pressing problem faced by humans is the need to keep in touch with and accountable for the essence of our humanness as values-based and time-oriented organisms whose intellectual and emotional contours are defined and bounded by political, economic, religious, biological, and cultural dimensions. (FL)

Three- to 5-year olds heard two novel labels each applied to the same novel object. About half the children accepted both labels, thereby overriding mutual exclusivity. About half the children honored mutual exclusivity by accepting only one of the labels. (BC)

Maintains that certain kinds of structured background information should be treated as essential components or accompaniments of word definitions. Discusses frame semantics, and presents a vision of the ideal dictionary, which is now becoming possible because of advances in computerized access to complex sources of information. (VWL)

Reconsiders development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. Suggests that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content, then, over time decays into a simple concord shell. Upon…

Argues that the polysemy view can not give a unified account of the meanings of can, may, must, and should, whereas the unitary meaning view does not encounter the problem. Unitary meanings are proposed that account both for the range of interpretations these modals can have and for why they get these interpretations. (21 references) (JL)

Discusses the possibility of storing a compressed form of a translated version of a text that takes advantage of the availability of the original version for more accurate understanding. Experiments that used humans and then computers to predict texts letter by letter are described. (12 references) (LRW)

Explores the theme of topicality, focusing on two books that contribute to the understanding of possessive construction and grammar.(Author/VWL)

Investigates conceptual barriers prevalent in the works of both proponents and opponents of semantic naturalism. Searches for a tenable definition of naturalism according to which one can be a realist, a non-reductionist, and a naturalist about semantic content. (Author/VWL)

Slow electrophysiological effects, which fluctuate throughout the course of a sentence, independent of transient responses to individual words, have been reported. However, this type of activity has scarcely been studied, and with only limited use of electrophysiological information, so that the brain areas in which these variations originate have…

Discourse comprehension theories frequently assume that discourse comprehension involves a complete analysis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of processing. However, discourse psychologists have documented some conditions when a partial processing and underspecification of the resulting representations occurs. The articles in…