Discusses various theoretical approaches to the semantic analysis of lexical units, focusing on the componential or axiological approach which defines a unit's semantic "value" as the combination of certain distinctive features. Concludes that this approach, so far, has not offered much practical assistance to translators faced with…

This paper attempts to develop some relatively well-defined notions that may be of use in descriptive semantics and in some areas of cognitive psychology. These notions are intended as explications of certain terms widely used in these fields such as semantic dimension, semantic feature, semantic space, category, conjunctive category, and sememe.…

This note examines motivations and consequences of a widely held generative phonological analysis of the Modern French vowel system. This analysis claims that only three degrees of vowel height are distinctive in Modern French. It is argued that the analysis would be improved by adding an additional degree of vowel height, creating a system which…

Finnish visual verbs and the corresponding terms in English are examined to reveal similarities and dissimilarities in the two semantic fields on the basis of translation equivalence. The contrastive analysis describes how the vocabularies of two genetically unrelated languages interpret the visual activity of seeing and looking, and what kind of…

This paper attempts to show that Zwicky's rule of Auxiliary Reduction is an incorrect analysis of the contraction of auxiliaries in English; and that the phonological processes involved are not as complicated as Zwicky makes them out to be. A simpler explanation is offered through analyzing auxiliary reduction as a three-step process. The three…

The author argues that a componential analysis of Russian case desinences is possible and useful, and that it consequently deserves a place in the linguistic analysis of Contemporary Standard Russian. The two basic assumptions of the author's theory are: first, that the meaning of cases reflects primarily the relation of substantives to the action…

The task of any phonetic theory is to determine the form of a phonetic component by establishing the internal and external constraints on that component. The phonetic component itself converts linguistic knowledge of the structure of the speech act into time-varying commands suitable for control of the articulatory mechanism. Performing involves…

This paper examines the phenomenon of final consonant deletion in clusters which do not agree in voicing and compares this phenomenon with clusters sharing the voicing feature. The speech studied is that of Puerto Rican and black Harlem teenagers. The data reported here refutes many of Bailey's (1972) claims. Clusters where voicing is not shared…

This paper presents a diachronic phonological analysis of French in order to show that Kiparsky's (1972) argument against formal (or language-specific) notation is based on a small sample of phenomena and is therefore not valid. Examples of vocalic tension in French are given, and the process from tension to relaxation is described. This tension…