This paper describes how a constraint dependency grammar (CDG) parser performs a syntactic analysis of a single sentence (as part of a speech recognition system). The paper extends an existing CDG (developed by H. Maruyama) to process a lattice or graph of sentence hypotheses instead of separate text strings. The paper also describes how the CDG…

This paper focuses on the idea that the study of language standards and standard languages must make reference to a different level of consciousness from that associated with the sort of naive language production in which the question of standards does not arise. Consciousness of language refers to the activity of reflecting upon the use of…

The communicative approach to translation seeks to bring a text to a new audience, to be assimilated in its new environment. The semantic approach views the text as a cultural artifact, borrowed from its original environment, to be displayed or studied. Translations are usually semantic, not communicative, because few translators are truly…

Much revisionist scholarship has focused on sophistic epistemology and its relationship to the current revival of epistemic rhetoric in the academy. However, few scholars have recognized the sensuous substance of words as sounds, and the role it played in sophistic philosophy and rhetoric. Before the invention of the Greek alphabet, poetry was…

Recent psycholinguistic literature has developed differing interpretations of metaphoric sentences' comprehension. The inadequacies of the psycholinguistic theories of language processing which rest on the assumption according to which language is the expression of a relatively autonomous cognitive activity are highlighted in the interpretation of…

English, and presumably any natural language, contains a small group of expressions referring to species of things found in nature. These species are defined by their internal structure, determined by genetics in the case of living things and by chemical or physical properties in the case of others. The reference of these terms is determined by…

A distribution of the Italian definite articles "il" and "lo" is proposed that makes use of both Steriade's syllabification rules and a language-specific sonority hierarchy. The incorporation of these rules results in the generalization that the definite article "il" occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a consonant that is a member of…

A defense of functionalism in linguistics, and more specifically the competition model of linguistic performance, examines six misconceptions about the functionalist approach. Functionalism is defined as the belief that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used for communicative functions. Functionalism…

This discussion of the utilization by computer designers and users of metaphors as organizing structures for dealing with the complexity of behavior of human/computer interfaces begins by identifying three types of metaphor that describe various aspects of human-computer interface design, i.e., activity, mode of interaction, and task domain. The…

After reading stories written in either chronological or flashback sequence, subjects made a decision about the underlying order of occurrence of two events. Results indicate that subjects based their responses on a memory representation, which preserved the input sequence of events. (Author/EJS)

Through a dialog argues that transformational grammar should not be used as the linguistic description in university courses in applied linguistics because it has no particular validity as a pedagogical grammar, because it has a narrow view of the nature of language, and because it is theoretically inadequate.(SED)

Describes a study that tried to answer the following: (1) Are the passives of all actional verbs equally easy to understand? (2) Are the passives of all experiential verbs in a child's vocabulary about equally hard to understand? (3) Does comprehension of passives differ from verb to verb in a category? (SED)

Reports on the applications of psycholinguistic principles to the formulations of jury charges in criminal trials in British Columbia. These principles were applied to standardize jury instructions both from the point of view of the legal information conveyed as well as from the sentence and discourse processing done by the jury. (SED)

Two experiments investigated the representation of meaning and input language in bilingual memory. (Author/RM)

Discusses two experiments into a subject's "Different" reaction time in judging whether two test instances are members of the same semantic category. (Author/RM)