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)

Points out that the Spanish "entonces," grammatically an adverb, is being used more and more as a conversational filler without real function or meaning. (Text is in Spanish.) (CK)

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)

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…

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…