In an examination of pronominal disagreements, this study examined how speakers on certain television interview programs resolve problems of agreement with formally singular epicene antecedents. The form most frequently used is "they," and some forms found in written English hardly occur. (54 references) (Author/LB)

It is proposed that syntactic processes (rules and constraints) may have a semantic basis. Evidence is presented that the constraint against backward pronominalization with indefinite antecedents derives from the semantic properties of various classes of definite noun phrases. (CK)

Investigation of French mothers' (N=6) use of pronouns to refer to their infants during free play showed that third- and first-person pronouns occurred more often in the context of affect-oriented activities than in goal-directed activities. Second-person pronoun usage occurred more frequently in goal-directed activities. (Author/CB)

Noun classes are said to have semantic content and be organized on a semantic basis. The system of organization is drawn up showing that divisions are made between unit and mass; under unit, shape and non-shape; under mass, liquid, lumpy, etc. Shape is divided into extended, curved, non-extended, etc. (SC)

The analysis predicts the distribution of cleft-like sentence types whose introducing particle is "this" or "that" rather than "it," and asserts a correlation between judgements of grammaticality of pseudo clefts and sentences containing free relatives. (Author/NCR)

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…

Reports on a study of a normally developing boy who made pronominal errors for about 10 months. Comprehension and production data clearly indicate that the child persistently made pronominal errors because of semantic confusion in the use of first- and second-person pronouns. (28 references) (GLR)

The Dutch deictics are typically given a locative analysis: the adverbial pronoun "hier" ("here") and the demonstrative "deze" ("this") are said to point near the speaker, "daar" ("there") and "die" ("that") to point far, with "er" (weak "there") and the article "de" ("the") left unspecified (Bech 1952:7). The present paper rejects this view,…

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains five articles. They are: "On Contrastive Contrastive Grammar," by Eric P. Hamp; "Remarks on Contrastive Analysis and Translation," by Vladimir Ivir; "Formal and Semantic Considerations in Contrastive Analysis," by Jerry L. Liston; "On Differences in…

Explores the use of reflexive pronouns in French. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Papers on nominal syntagma as objects in discourse include: "Quelques notions utiles a la semantique des descripteurs nominaux" ("Some Useful Notions on the semantics of Nominal Descriptors") (Alain Berrendonner); "Note sur le statut semantique et la fonction de quelques relatives integrees" ("Note on the…

An analysis is made of three "wh" words -- what, which, and who -- which are most frequently used as interrogative and relative pronouns in English. An attempt is made to find some formal syntactic markers distinguishing these two uses and consequently to postulate distinct feature matrices for them. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

Analysis of data from Kekchi, a head-marking language following Mayan patterns, can provide insight into case relations and pronominal reference in head-marking languages. Tensed verb constructions are examined, focusing attention on how the verb stem can determine both the number of referents and their semantic roles. The language's predication…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…