The meaning of a word often cannot be formulated by conscious rules, because it is unconscious. Evidence on the verb "break" demonstrates this. The consequence for teaching is that teachers cannot supply meanings in words, but should present a wide range of uses of a word, so that students can intuit the unconscious generalization. (Author)

This paper examines the actual content and use of Indian vocabulary in standard Guatemalan Spanish, as opposed to the numerous entries found in antiquated dictionaries. Over 600 Indian words were extracted from contemporary Guatemalan literature and Lisandro Sandoval's "Semantica guatemalense." Interviews were arranged with middle and…

The purpose of this paper is to classify the types of errors Arabs make with definiteness in English and to count the rate of occurrence of each. To accomplish this, 16 three-hour American history final examinations written by Arabic speakers at the University of Texas at Austin were examined. This discussion is limited to the four categories (out…

Over the years the Navajo language has received more attention than any other American Indian language. The grammatical work represents all traditions in American Indian linguistic research, from the earliest descriptivism to the latest generative grammar. In addition, there exists a large amount of material written in Navajo and a plethora of…

This is a tongue-in-cheek rendering of an imaginary linguist's attempt to prove that a grammatical rule is not in fact optional, but conditioned. Through manipulation of the data, use of computers, etc., he succeeds in "proving" this. He also "proves" that this conditioning is contextual; that the rule which exhibits it is…

This study was conducted to find and collocate the semantically equivalent form patterns of the English and Hungarian relation-marking systems by contrasting the use of the individual relational morphemes. The ultimate aim of the study is to determine interlingual congruences and contrasts for possible use in language teaching. The investigation…

This collection of 14 papers and articles by Roman Jakobson contains works written and published between 1931 and 1970 which deal either with global aspects of language or with specific grammatical issues. The collection emphasizes Jakobson's concern for finding the links between form and meaning in language. The text is entirely in German with…

This study of the acquisition of kinship terms in English is a test of the hypothesis that lexical items are learned in their order of complexity and of the validity of relational analysis in predicting the order of the acquisition of kinship terms. Earlier studies of kinship terms, Piaget's in particular, are first discussed, as well as the…

This paper reviews the psychological theories and research which deal with the meaning of words in the course of human psychological development. The three major premises of the review are: (1) that word meaning is conducive to empirical study, (2) that rules can be produced that apply to most word meanings, and (3) that human development has…

The problem of the panel on semantics, concepts, and culture, sponsored by the National Institute of Education Conference on Studies in Reading, was to determine how lexical, semantic, conceptual, and cultural factors contribute to reading comprehension. The contents of the document include the following: "Word Recognition Skills," which…

This paper focuses on the necessity for a holistic, responsive evaluation of the educational process due to education's complex, dynamic, and humanistic nature. Holistic evaluation involves the assessment of all intended goals, interactions, and program results, as opposed to selective evaluation of only a few key variables. Responsive evaluation…

An article and a bibliography constitute this issue of the "Illinois English Bulletin." In "Keep the Natives from Getting Restless," Barry Gadlin examines native language learning by children from infancy through high school and discusses the theories of several authors concerning the teaching of the native language. The "Bibliography of…

A new language-processing system, CONSTRUCT, is described and defined as a question-answering system for elementary mathematical language using natural language input. The primary goal is said to be an attempt to reach a better understanding of the relationship between syntactic and semantic components of natural language. The "meaning…

The first of two papers on language history broadly defines historical linguistics and considers the activities of the descriptive linguist, who classifies the features of a language; the comparative linguist, who relates languages to one another; and the historical linguist, who is interested in the changes, completed and anticipated, of a living…

This paper argues that traditional techniques of content analysis which have been applied to classroom verbal interaction studies fail to account for certain types of implicit information, and presents a technique, called "reconstruction," that provides for the inclusion of such information in a content analysis. It is argued that if…