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)

Across languages, clauses expressing possession, location, and existence exhibit many similarities. To capture their evident affinity, it is often claimed that possessives derive--synclironically or diaclironically--from expressions of location/existence. This localist account obscures a basic contrast between two broad classes of possessive…

Concludes that cue systems within words (graphics) are affected by syntactic and semantic cue systems within the sentences. (RB)

"More" and "less" were analyzed into two meaning dimensions, "occurence" and "quantity", which were hypothesized to be developmentally related to acts of addition and subtraction. (SBT)

This paper describes a computational approach to certain problems of anaphora in natural language and argues in favor of formal meaning representation languages (MRLs) for natural language. After presenting arguments in favor of formal meaning representation languages, appropriate MRLs are discussed. Minimal requirements include provisions for…

Previous research has shown that adults tend to narrow the meanings of words encountered in context, a process that has been termed instantiation. In the present study, 60 first and fourth graders selected pictures which best represented the meanings of sentences read to them. The sets of pictures included three examples of a target word in each…