Kindergarten-aged children's use of parallel constructions in their peer storytelling, while not common, reflect children's interest in the organizational principle of theme and variation. Semantic and syntactic parallelism represent two of many ways in which some youngsters employ theme and variation in their storytelling. The constructions give…

The paper presents and demonstrates a heuristic for helping students learn how to read and understand figuration in literature. The heuristic contains elements from linguistics, New Criticism, and rhetorical analysis in a recursive process which enables students to see how features of words combine into figurative patterns. Beginning at the level…

A study of the vocabulary of business and economics involved morphological and semantic analysis of a sample of the lexis. The investigation began with the assumption that this lexis is not a rigid system of clearly-defined terms. Morphologically, a high degree of variety in productive types of compounding was found, exceeding by far the…

Use of communication theory in an analysis of the court proceedings of the Jean Harris murder trial suggests that Harris contributed to her conviction with her inconsistent use of language and her refusal to remain in low-profile. Harris' defense attorney attempted to portray her as an upstanding, well-bred member of the community, and as a…

The Japanese sentence-final particle "no" is analyzed as a marker of evidentiality, signaling that the speaker shares a commitment to the knowledge in question with a group of which he is part. In contrast, bare verb forms (BVs) (i.e., the absence of "no") indicate that the speaker, as an individual, is committed to the…

The relation definition theory proposed in this paper is explicitly different from previous semantic memory theories since it is the first to make a relation's definition the basis of semantic processing. The paper suggests that this relation definition theory successfully predicts relation similarity on the basis of one key primary assumption:…

A study investigated the effect on reading comprehension of using semantic impressions as a previewing activity to provide an overall impression of a story's structure. Subjects, 31 eighth grade remedial reading students from a suburban junior high school, were divided into two groups: a treatment group that received semantic impressions as a…

Features are discussed that are critical to the comprehension of texts and that readability formulas cannot handle. The critique and alternative analyses are confined to public and institutional documents and are based on research in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Two types of comprehensibility complications are examined, those…

A study investigated the inferential processing involved in the comprehension of a class of complex predicates (such as "remember to,""manage to,""fail to," and "neglect to") that are known as implicative. The subjects, 64 college students, were timed while they drew inferences from syntactically affirmative…

A formula for assessing style is described and applied to compositions written by adult students of English as a second language. Style is defined as the total effect of what is done by a writer in the composing process, including choice of words, organization, and sentence and paragraph strategies. Earlier attempts to quantify style are reviewed.…

Intended to facilitate the preparation of thesauri for the indexing of documents in any subject field, this report presents a set of rules pertaining to the complex issues and questions involved in indexing vocabulary development and construction. After a brief discussion of the nature, functions, and components of indexing vocabularies, a set of…

Evidence of semantically based orderings of phrasal coordinations in child speech is explored. Speech samples from two children are analyzed to show that such sequences occur frequently, are internally consistent, and are part of children's active repertoire of referential and expressive acts at an early age. The samples were obtained from one…

Written in response to T. G. McGee's recent discussion of the "peasants in cities" paradox (see EJ080361), this article argues that a modified version of Eric Wolf's definition of "peasants" is the most useful one currently available. (Author/KM)

T. G. McGee responds to Barry Isaac's article (RC501590), which discusses McGee's earlier article (see EJ080361) defining "peasants in cities". (KM)

Considers the question in language teaching as to whether the use of visual aids prevents thinking in the native language. (LG)