An essay on the Spanish word "vaina," which originally meant "sheath,""scabbard,""pod" or "husk," but which in several Latin American countries now translates as "nuisance," or "bother." (Text is in Spanish.) (CK)

Formal semantic analysis appears to be capable of handling certain cases where kin terms appear to cover an illogical assortment of relatives, an assortment which constitutes a disjunctive class. Two examples are the kin terms "ngaraija" and "tjilja," used by the Njamal, an Australian tribe. (CFM)

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)

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.…

On the basis of empirical data this paper concludes that knowledge relating to the use and meaning of American English Kin terms is shared and that multiple semantic models do not exist in the minds of American English speakers. (CFM)

Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Linguistics and Translation, October 4-7, 1972, Montreal, Canada. (DD)

Discusses the theoretical and practical foundations of grammatical terminology defining the relationship with linguistic terminology and with the general lexicon. Devotes particular attention to the analysis of the semantic and syntactic properties of grammatical terms, to the various types of neologisms, and to the structure of the definitional…

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…

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…

Response to Robert A. Hall, Jr.'s article, "Why a Structural Semantics Is Impossible," Language Sciences, n21. (DD)

The cardinal aim of this paper is to demonstrate interrelationships between patterns of social behavior and patterns of terminology. The author postulates that the terminology significantly symbolizes behavioral patterns and proceeds to examine the relationship of Russian kinship terminology and social structure in the context of a pre-industrial…

This paper examines the semantic structure of antonyms on the basis of some examples taken from Romanian. Both grammatical and lexical antonyms are considered with a view toward grasping the correspondence and differences between the two classes. Representative examples illustrate the following conclusions: (1) the distinction between lexical and…

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…