Discusses what the terms "fiction" and "nonfiction" mean with respect to science writing. Contends that it is time to recognize the fictional dimension of all science writing and to acknowledge what is often thought "pure" as a blend of fictional and nonfictional elements. (FL)

Analyzes the argumentational structure of a legal document. (AM)

Examines the question of the transitivity of the part-whole relation in grammar, in the context of the sentence and its semantic structure. (AM)

Contrary to earlier assertions, young children do not interpret the word different to mean same. Both 2 1/2-year-old children and adults interpret requests for same or different objects appropriately, apparently following conventions of conversational discourse. These data offer no support for a discrete semantic-feature model of acquiring word…

Preschool children were tested for their understanding of the words "more" and "less" in a comprehension condition and a construction condition. (Author/JMB)

Four theories of the human conceptual system--semantic memory, exemplar models, feed-forward connectionist nets, and situated simulation theory--are characterized and contrasted on five dimensions. Empirical evidence is then reviewed for the situated simulation theory and conclusions are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Examines colloquial uses of "like" as a discourse marker with the goal of specifying its discourse functions, including semantic, pragmatic, and sociopragmatic aspects of meaning. Data presented come from nine interviews. (Author/VWL)

States that Christian Morgenstern made a fundamental point of semantics clear by making any absolute faith in words ridiculous. Describes other pieces of Morgenstern's poetry, and examines its implications in semantic terms. Points out that Morgenstern ridiculed the assumption that what is said must be sensible, as if the world must obey human…

Elaborates upon the linguistic implications of results centered around "prospect theory." Issues examined include granularity of meaning, including the status of thematic roles and the foreground/background distinction; the relationship of schematic and conceptual structure; information packaging; and the interface between the semantics of verbs…

Argues that the mismatches that often exist between a word's morphological structure and its semantics can be resolved by a model-based theory in which morphological rules are formulated as operations on morphological expression, in which formal relationships exist between the model root, and the words in that example are defined by a set of model…

How the data of W. J. M. Levelt et al. (1991) can be reconciled with interactive spreading-activation theories of language production is explained. A reply by Levelt and others refutes this assertion and argues that their original data were in full agreement with predictions of the two-stage theory of lexical processing. (SLD)

Analysis of six cross-linguistic properties characterizing the head verb in the resultative construction in Chinese shows that the first verb, and not the second verb, should be analyzed as the head verb. (15 references) (Author/CB)

Briefly describes the results of six studies comparing English-language homonyms and heteronyms in earlier dictionaries and their survival rates in later dictionaries, concluding that, in each of the studies, as many or more, not fewer, of the homonyms survived. (14 references) (CB)

Discusses the performance of automatic direct machine translation systems available through the Internet and examines semantic processing errors that result in confusion when the intended meaning of sentences is not correctly translated. Suggests the need for Web-based translation systems that have an explicit cross-linguistic representation of…

Presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness. (Author/VWL)