An investigation of the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. A tendency of English speakers to use alternative surface structure rules to present given information before new information is demonstrated. (AMH)

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun-noun compounds. Results indicate that semantic relationships that hold between members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of appropriate compounding relationships. (CHK)

Examines, within a single experiment, whether the conditions exist for drawing a valid inference about the possibility of a word losing its meaning through either visual satiation or visual "and" verbal satiation. Evaluates research by Fillenbaum (1964) and Esposito and Pelton (1969). (Author/RK)

Describes the use of commercial advertisements in an exercise in semantics in the French classroom. (Text is in French.) (AM)

Shows the development of the social place of women as reflected in the change in usage of words denoting women's roles. The contemporary connotations of such words as "Weib" and "Hausfrau" are defined and the development of these connotations is outlined and compared to the meanings of equivalent terms for men. (Text is in German.) (TL)

This paper formulates a semantic distinction between predicates in Japanese which take indirect questions and those which cannot, and advances a hypothesis that the former crucially involve in their semantics the absence, acquisition, presence, and loss of information relevant in certain ways. (Author)

Critically examines the foci of four prevalent explanations for reading failure in children: visual perception, intersensory integration, temporal-order perception, and verbal functioning. Applying findings from his own laboratory investigations and other selected research to each of the four hypotheses, author argues that the verbal-deficit…

Telegraphic conciseness is possible because of three processes: simplification of utterences by eliminating modal and functional words; recourse to semantics outside of any syntactic context; and recourse to a shared context. Telegraphic syntax is simply a slightly different usage of language rules. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Nominalization of possessive sentences in Russian is discussed. It is maintained that all lexical surface items originate as terms in a situation model, and that their actualization as different parts of speech is language-specific. Language data are used to support a locative interpretation of the semantic model. (CHK)

Analysis of the performance of second-, fourth-, sixth-grade, and college-level subjects on picture-word interference tasks indicated that distractor words belonging to the same semantic category as pictures produced more interference than either unrelated words or nonsense trigrams. (Author/JMB)

A short description of the wide variety in the listing of compound prepositions in most dictionaries. A few suggestions for systematization are made. (AMH)

Usage of the German "doch" is explained as an aid to teaching. (CHK)

Surveyed 54 young, 54 middle-aged, and 54 older adults on connotative meanings of 10 common nouns referring to older persons. Results were similar across age groups. Mature American, Senior Citizen, and Retired Person were rated generally positively while Aged, Elderly, and nouns using "old" were rated more negatively. (Author/NB)

Reviews evidence supporting the Contrastive Hypothesis, revealing little support for the hypothesis that young children automatically assume that every two words in their lexicons contrast. Theoretical problems with the positions that children assign words to semantic fields as they are acquiring them and that innovations are used to fill lexical…

Discusses a study that examines which combination of animate and inanimate actors (anyone or anything performing an action) and patients (the thing that is the object of action) two-year-olds view as prototypical. Results suggest that the actor category is usually acquired first for prototypical sentences with animate actors and inanimate…