This paper reports three experiments that test the Presupposition-Denial account of complement set reference. According to the theory, complement set focus arises when focus is on the difference between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a large presupposed amount. We call this difference the shortfall. In this paper, what is…

An analysis of the task, on the semantic level, facing the translator of a literary text, illustrated by a verse from the Bible. The process of capturing meaning through the study of sources and methods of dealing with ambiguities are discussed. A selected reference list is attached. (AMH)

A system of quantitative techniques for describing the English language from a number of perspectives, intended for the language analyst, is presented. The grammar combines an emerging knowledge of semantics with existing detailed knowledge of syntax. The primary unit of analysis is the predication, a group of related concepts expressed as a…

Cross cultural comparisons of the underlying psychological structures of 20 kinship terms for 17 selected language/culture communities were investigated. An evaluation was made of the technique used. (Author/RM)

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.…

Discusses the estrangement between etymology and modern linguistics, and concludes that a reconciliation between spatio-temporal linguistics and etymology must occur, because without it, both disciplines are doomed to inanition. (Author/AM)

Lexical semantics and contrastive lexical semantics can serve as a background discipline to describe and, to some extent, to explain errors in interlanguage. Two developments in lexical semantics that are relevant in this area are the description of sense-relationships and componential analysis. Contrastive lexical semantics involves mapping the…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

This second volume in a series of French publications of specialized, introductory books on the study of linguistics presents a structured, panoramic view of the study of lexicology dating from the writings of Panini (4 B.C.) through recent linguistic developments. The selected readings, covering five major areas of concern, concentrate on: (1)…

Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar model may effectively be translated into an equivalent computer model. Phrase-structure rules and transformations are tested as to their validity and ordering by the computer via the process of random lexical substitution. Errors appearing in the grammar are detected and rectified, and formal…

Criticism has been directed at a growing body of literature broadly referred to as ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, folk science, ethnographic semantics, and cognitive anthropology. Criticisms concern methodological and analytic aspects of ethnoscientific procedure, and the directions of ethnosemantic research from a theoretical point of view. The…

This is a study of the kinds of processes involved in learning the meaning of individual lexical items, and in particular how the acquisition of lexical meaning is related to the cognitive structuring of events on the one hand and the ability to produce syntactic paraphrases of a word's meaning and other related constructions on the other. It is…