Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

Argues that the nonfuture use of "will" has exactly the same semantic structure as the future "will," and that the basic meaning of "will" is potential rather than future. (Author/HP)

Critical evaluation of Schlesinger's theory of language acquisition as expounded in Production of Utterances and Language Acquisition'' in The Ontogenesis of Grammar'', p63-101, New York: Academic Press, 1971. (RS)

Presents two different types of progressive construction in Spanish and Catalan, one referring to a state or event, and the other to the development of an event. The article argues that the first is predicated of a homogenous period of time, whereas the other is predicated of a period of time divided into consecutive phases. (23 references)…

Analyzes numerous examples of English and German verbs with respect to alternations they undergo and concludes that the semantic classes of verbs that undergo a particular alternation differ between these two languages but that there are some semantic constraints on this variation. The article stresses the limited nature of the study. (Seven…

Final chapter of "The Grammatical Foundations of Rhetoric", to be published by Mouton, The Hague, Netherlands. (DD)

Original version of this paper was read at the Fifth Meeting of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, University of Maryland, May 1971. Argues that accounting for coherence in discourse should be one of the goals of linguistic theory; making coherent discourse, not the isolated sentence, the domain of linguistic explanation also throws…

Nominalization of possessive sentences in Russian is discussed. It is maintained that all lexical surface items originate as terms in a situation model, and that their actualization as different parts of speech is language-specific. Language data are used to support a locative interpretation of the semantic model. (CHK)

Examines "it"-clefts and "wh"-clefts in English and their Chinese equivalents in a universal, functional perspective that consists of assigning "participant roles" in processing a clause. The analysis shows that a functionally-oriented and semantically-motivated approach to the focusing constructions provides greater insight into the discourse…

Working within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework of Anna Wierzbicka, this study proposes reductive paraphrase explications for a range of first-person pronominal meanings. It is argued that NSM explications are preferable to conventional feature analysis because they are less subject to charges of arbitrariness and obscurity and…

Investigates the pragmatic functions of topicalizing subject (S) and object (O) in Standard Arabic and attempts to find a functional explanation for the occasional preposing/topicalization of S and/or O over the verb (V) to yield a construction in the form of SVO order or any other order sanctioned by the rules of Arabic grammar. (22 references)…