One of the analyses carried out within the University of Uppsala (Sweden) study, "LSP Texts in the 20th Century," classified the cognitive text content into five different cognitive worlds: the scientific, the practical, the object, the private, and the external. This paper investigated patterns of distribution in the texts of these…

A discussion of English native-language vocabulary acquisition in children takes a closer look at the assumption that vocabulary is learned by common association of word with event, focusing on the acquisition of verb meanings. The intuitive power of the view that words are learned by noticing real-world contingencies for their use is…

Ways of identifying at-risk students are examined in this paper, which compares the perceptions of four groups--educational researchers, national reform groups, student and local policymakers, and teachers. The comparison is placed within the social and historical contexts of the development of educational policies for at-risk students in the late…

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…

Alcoholism is an almost universal problem which varies in nature and extent from culture to culture. To discriminate between French and American students on the basis of measured attitudes toward alcohol, American college students (N=291) and French college students (N=308) completed attitude measures for alcohol derived from a 14 scale semantic…

The expression of modal meanings presents a difficulty even for advanced speakers of a foreign language and it has been shown that beginning and intermediate learners produce few modal auxiliaries. To investigate the phenomenon, a functional/semantic framework was used to determine what forms these students use to convey a particular meaning. The…

This glossing system is designed to fill the gap between grammar studies and reading. The system reflects flexional and derivational morphology of words as well as lexical relationships of synonymy, antonymy, homonymy and structural similarity and polysemy. It is intended to help students learn and understand vocabulary for successful reading.…

The experimental freshman English course described here weds the teaching of basic reading and writing skills to an introduction to the humanities. Although the semester course is divided into four discrete and sequential mini-courses (semantics, philosophy, history, and myth), the units together develop a common and unifying theme of freedom.…

Male undergraduate volunteers (N=27) were interviewed by nine male counseling students using an intake interview. Each student counselor saw three subjects, one in each of three counselor-client distance conditions: 18 inches, 30 inches, and 48 inches. Subjects' degree of comfort scores ranged from highest for 30 inches to lowest for 18 inches…

A method is proposed for formalizing the basic meanings underlying the forms of verbs which contain future reference. The method proposed is intended as a contribution to pedagogical grammar rather than theoretical linguistics. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

Boundaries in running speech are not all equally obvious acoustically. The research reported here is concerned with identifying the acoustic characteristics that trigger the listener's response to boundary signals. The eventual goal is to establish the relevance of the boundary to the syntactic and semantic structure of the message. (Author/TL)

Foreign language instruction, particularly the learning of new vocabulary, could greatly benefit from the structural description of semantic fields. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

The separation of the mechanics of rhetoric from the ethics of rhetoric has had disastrous consequences, in education and in our public life. (JH)

Analysis of the factors that make a text coherent or non-coherent suggests that total coherence requires cohesion not only on the textual surface but on the semantic level as well. Syntactic evidence of non-coherence includes lack of formal agreement blocking a potential cross-reference, anaphoric and cataphoric references that do not follow their…