This study was conducted to discover how Nonstandard Negro English speaking kindergarten children form verb phrases and what they mean by the various forms. It was limited to the main verb in each sentence; passive forms and imbedded sentences were excluded. Only verb phrases from four types of sentences were analyzed: declarative, negative,…

The relevance of general semantics to subject areas in the behavioral sciences has been established many times over, although the application of the principles concerned does not always reflect acceptance. The problem of semantics as related to mental retardation has great importance as life affecting decisions are made in accord with beliefs and…

Class in Bantu and its syntactic significance is discussed with reference to gender in Indo-European and semantic/syntactic features of nouns. On the basis of modern Bantu evidence and the comparative method, a maximum of 21 classes have been posited for proto-Bantu. The striking difference in the number of classes posited for proto-Bantu and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the disruptive effect of unknown words on reading and to examine this effect in relationship to grammatical position and modification type. Forty second grade children from two different lower middle class, semirural schools were randomly assigned to the standardization group or the experimental group.…

A sample of 204 counseling students and counselors with differing levels of experience and education from Utah colleges, universities, and public schools was asked to rate themselves and the ideal counselor on 38 semantic differential scales. Discrepancy scores derived from self-ideal differences were analyzed and found to support the hypotheses…

By looking at the history of geometry and the concept of congruence in geometry we can get a new perspective on how to think about the closeness in meaning of two sentences. As in the analysis of congruence in geometry, a definite and concrete set of proposals about congruence of meaning depends essentially on the kind of theoretical framework…

This test was designed to measure awareness of the relationship existing between sentences that are similar in specific semantic content but different in syntactic structure. The test consists of twenty-five items of the three-option multiple-response type, with the stem of each item being a "pattern" sentence to be matched with one of the three…

Designed to index the kinds of meaning relationships that children perceive to exist between words and their references, this test consists of 276 pairs comprising 24 categories. For each item of the test, the subjects were asked to rank each pair of statements depending on how well they thought the words on the left were described. Content…

This paper identifies and describes three distinct variables on which prose passages can differ, from a linguistic point of view. Each of these variables relates to the way in which the content of prose is organized to convey meaning to the reader. The first variable is the position of information in a structure representing a passage's…

This study identified reasons to believe that one particular way of teaching writing is theoretically sound; explicated the use theory of meaning; defined a theory of rhetoric which was compatible with the use theory; presented a set of beliefs about the nature of thought and about how the mind learns; and presented exemplary classroom activities…

The purposes of this investigation were: (1) to analyze the critical writing achievement and the critical thinking achievement of groups of students of various abilities who received instruction in general semantics with similar groups of students who did not, (2) to determine if instruction in general semantics was equally effective for all…

The objective of this paper is to combine the viewpoint of model-theoretic semantics and generative grammar, to define semantics for context-free languages, and to apply the results to some fragments of natural language. Following the introduction in the first section, Section 2 describes a simple artificial example to illustrate how a semantic…

To determine whether the use of obscenities at college demonstrations creates negative hostile responses among the general population or positive and inclusive feelings toward the demonstrators, or both responses, interviews were conducted in the Denver Metropolitan area. An interview questionnaire was administered to 200 informants, 175…

The research contained in this report is directed at the problem of assessing structures of knowledge in science. Toward this end graduate as well as undergraduate students were asked to make judgments of the perceived similarity of expressions that mark or label concepts in the subject matter of physics. An apriori model of the structure of…

This book discusses the special jargon used by black people in the United States. In the first two chapters the author, a white man, discusses his personal experiences with the black community in order to establish an argument for the need for more awareness of what black jargon is and how it is used. Chapter three proposes that standard English…