The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective "vysokij" "high", a morphologically unrelated…

How do people define ethnicity and its membership? Primordialists argue that people group themselves using "primal" or permanent characteristics like physical similarity or a common language, religion, or history. Social mobilizationists, however, see ethnicity as more situational social phenomena, as an informal organization whereby…

Several hypotheses about the nature of word meaning are discussed and discarded in favor of one that treats semantic atoms (distinctive semantic elements) as elemental predicates that can be arranged in any configuration. (Author/KM)

Attempts to prove the existence of semantic atoms from the existence of minimal contrasts (phonologic or semantic). (CHK)

Discusses a stratificational view of the lexicon by (1) defining the transformational-generative lexicon; (2) considering some undesirable consequences of the lexicon; and (3) showing the stratificational model to be simpler and more complete than the transformational-generative version. (CHK)

Paper presented during a colloquium on mathematical linguistics at the Romanian Academy, Bucharest, May 26, 1972. (RS)

Africanisms are characteristics occurring frequently in African languages but rarely elsewhere. This paper reviews Africanisms presented by Greenberg and Larochette and submits a number of others with sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic relevance. Items are grouped according to phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. (CK)

A model of the structure of complex words based on an organization of the internal lexicon by shared-meaning content is proposed. Results of traditional linguistic experiments testing the hypothesis show that meaning content is a more salient basis for judgments of similarity and difference than is meaning structure. (PMJ)

Discusses the possessive, existential, and locational usages of the Mandarin Chinese verb "you3," arguing for the formulation of a single lexical entry of the verb within lexical-functional grammar and demonstrating the similarities between English idiom chunks and you3 expressions. (20 references) (Author/CB)

Compares studies of English-based creoles in Atlantic with work on pidgins and creoles in Pacific to examine the core of lexicon that cannot be traced to current standard English and historical relationship between languages. The lexical base of Pacific varieties was both English and English-based creoles of the Atlantic. Grammatical and lexical…

Examines 158 examples of malapropisms and determines three possible sources of this type of error: (1) childhood errors that were never corrected, (2) other kinds of imperfect learning, and (3) breakdown in the storage and retrieval system of the mental lexicon. (AM)

Examination of accidental CVC and CV correspondences among languages representing 5 large families of agglutinative languages found that comparison pairs had much more similarity between basic 100-word vocabularies than would have been possible by mere chance, supporting the hypothesis that those 5 language families were mutually related.…

Examines how one approach to the study of language, ethno-methodological conversation analysis, accomplishes the integration of linguistic phenomena into the practical continuum of human activity. It is concluded that an integrational rhetoric should and can produce close, detailed, empirical analyses of situated discursive action. (51 references)…