A general semantics perspective of science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt is presented in this paper. The first major section of the paper contains a biographical sketch of van Vogt and traces the influence of A. Korzybski's work on general semantics, "Science and Sanity," on his writing, while the second major section provides an…

Three experiments were conducted to determine how children assign meaning to a multiple-meaning word in a sentence context. Fourth-grade children were given sentences in which a key word carried a meaning other than its "primary," or most familiar, meaning. Two types of multiple choice questions could then follow: in the first type, the secondary,…

A theory for representation of concepts in memory is proposed which emphasizes the association of salient exemplars with the concept. Previous theories dealing with the classification processes involved in acquiring new concepts have shown that clear category boundaries do not exist. It is proposed that present theory must account for the…

Contrastive analysis can help solve certain problems in translation, for example, that of idioms. A contrastive analysis of source language (SL) and target language (TL) might have as its theoretical framework a contrastive lexical analysis based on generative semantics. In this approach both SL and TL idioms are broken down into their semantic…

Forty Swedish university students produced sentences from homographs that could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of polysemy (multiple meaning). The results indicated that the subjects prefered verb productions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the…

The natural process of learning language is to concentrate on what we mean, not only on how we are saying it. What we mean is dependent upon the context in which we speak. This context in turn depends on the society or the speech-community in which our speech act takes place. To be a member of a speech community is to know what language behavior…

From an outline of the recent history of the psychology of language the author proceeds to discuss research that has been done recently in psycholinguistics. These studies fall within the following areas: (1) "The Study of Grammar as a Psychological Process," (2) "How We Remember Sentences," (3) "What We Do When We…

This high-school students' handbook on linguistics and the English language is the second of a two-volume series (see AL 001 318). This revised edition does not follow the order of table of contents in Volume I, but consists of the following units--(1) pronunciation and spelling, (2) syntax, (3) punctuation and suprasegmentals, and (4) meaning and…

This paper reports a portion of a research effort to develop a program which will simulate the language learning behavior of humans. Here presented is a heuristic parsing procedure which accepts natural language sentences and produces for each a form of analysis called a "labeled dependency tree." The formal grammar on which the…

There are various types of dictionaries, depending on the goals for which a dictionary is compiled. The main intention of a bilingual dictionary is to indicate the semantic equivalence of the lexical items of two languages. Bilingual dictionaries are used primarily for two purposes: a speaker of the target language uses the dictionary in order to…

This paper begins with a description of four generations of research in machine translation: the original efforts of 1957 to 1965 and three types of surviving and sometimes competing present projects. The three types of present projects include those relying on "brute force" methods involving larger and faster computers; those based on a…

NLS-SCHOLAR is a prototype system that uses artificial intelligence techniques to teach computer-naive people how to use a powerful and complex editor. This new kind of computer assisted instruction system integrates systematic teaching with actual practice, keeping the user under tutorial supervision while allowing him to try out what he learns…

Semantic and syntactical features of storybooks in the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Reading Program are reviewed and analyzed. To make the scripts match children's oral language as closely as possible within other program constraints and to avoid potential semantic difficulties, the following changes are recommended: (1) the introduction…

The linguistic atlas projects have provided much information on the regional distribution of pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax and have given important evidence for a greater understanding of problems involved in semantic change, particularly in pointing out transition areas where dialects become fused. In a study supplementary to that…

The objective of this research was to successfully model several semantic domains in English and Spanish, in order to (a) test the reliability of judged-similarities tasks in cross-cultural situations and (b) obtain information about changes in semantic organization with bilingualism and education. To achieve these goals, data were collected in…