This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

Research has shown that following a sentence fragment such as "John impressed Mary because...," people are most likely to refer to John, whereas following "John admired Mary because...," Mary is the preferred referent. Two written completion experiments investigated whether such semantic biases affect the choice of anaphor (pronouns vs. names).…

I articulate and defend a necessary and sufficient condition for an occurrence of a term to function semantically as a predicate. The condition is that the term occurrence stands in the relation of "ascription" to its denotation, ascription being a fundamental semantic relation that differs from reference. This view on predication has dramatically…

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing three types of adjective sequences: (1) normal sequences--e.g., "Jennifer rode a huge gray elephant"; (2) reversed sequences that violate grammatical-semantic constraints on linear order--e.g., *"Jennifer rode a…

Children's early attempts at syntax, previously described in terms of pivot grammar, are discussed in the light of the author's research on the semantic intentions of early two-word sentences. Underlying conceptual relations were identified when such utterances were examined along with context and behavior. (Author/KW)

Synonyms are not in syntactic free-variation. Some text composition rules are examined and it is shown that they prevent the occurrence of paradoxical utterances which could arise if synonyms were freely substitutable. (Text is in German.) (TL)

Identifies the characteristics of clear references to explain why certain kinds of broad pronoun reference are clear while others are not. (HTH)

The value of teaching children to look objectively at language as they make the transition from reality-bound sentences to linguistically correct sentences is examined. (HTH)

Four categories of statements are isolated in an attempt to analyze relationships between voice, tense and use of auxiliaries in French. The deep structure theory of generative grammar is questioned and a theory of semantic distinctions operating within the forms of a language is proposed. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

In the second volume of this two volume document (See TE 002 130.), Thomas Shroyer, in "Aesthetic Theory and Linguistic Investigation," explores the connections between linguistic inquiry and the art theory of Susanne Langer. He attempts to provide the understanding necessary for the teaching of literary art as one product of linguistic…

Just as a reader must bring an experiential conceptual background to the printed page, so must he bring an ability to recognize the graphic cues that signal meaning. The graphic cues or structural meaning works as a system the description of which can be outlined in three parts as the vocabulary, the structure, and the sound. What has been…