Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers' attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also…

The current study investigated the possibility that language switches could be relatively automatically triggered by context. "Single-word switches," in which bilinguals switched languages on a single word in midsentence and then immediately switched back, were contrasted with more complete "whole-language switches," in which…

Understanding the microstructure and macrostructure of passages is important for reading comprehension. What cognitive-linguistic skills may contribute to understanding these two levels of structures has rarely been investigated. The present study examined whether some word-level and text-level cognitive-linguistic skills may contribute…

This article investigates the lexical and discourse features of English text and discourse with automated computer technologies. Specifically, this article examines the cohesion of English text and discourse with automated computer tools, Coh-Metrix and TEES. Coh-Metrix is a text analysis computer tool that can analyze English text and discourse…

Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), as a theory of the organization of natural languages, seeks to attain pragmatic, typological and cognitive adequacy. The attempt to achieve cognitive adequacy has been fraught with problems stemming from the vagueness of the concept and the difficulty of adapting to trends in psycholinguistics. Specifically,…

This study explores complex language in adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) with the aim of finding out how aspects of language characteristic of typical syntactic development after childhood fare and, in particular, whether there is evidence that individuals with SLI avoid using structures whose syntactic derivation involves…

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause…

We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent,…

In this study, 5-year-olds and adults described scenes that differed according to whether (a) the subject or object of a transitive verb represented an accessible or inaccessible referent, consistent or inconsistent with patterns of preferred argument structure, and (b) a simple noun was sufficient to uniquely identify an inaccessible referent.…

A brief psychosystematic analysis of the problem of auxiliaries in French, and of the solution offered by the internal psychomechanism of the language as found in Gustave Guillaume's research. "Avoir" and "etre"" are studied in some detail from several aspects. There is a short bibliography. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Describes a model that distinguishes seven types of meaning that can function in reading: discoursal, lexical, morphological, propositional, syntactic, rhetorical, and functional. (MKM)

This paper explores the problem of reconciling general psychological processing constraints with linguistic constraints on discourse structure. Two types of psychological constraints, the 'immediacy constraint' and the 'limited focusing constraint' are shown to combine with linguistic constraints to determine the pattern of eye movements during…

Describes ongoing research into errors in spontaneous speech. (RM)

A linguistic analysis of interviews between three patients and their psychiatrists and psychoanalysts which showed correspondence between the communication situation and the language used. The discussion includes reasons for choosing psychosomatic patients, lexical and syntactic analysis, and a short discussion of Harris's method of discourse…