Argues in favor of a syntactic analysis of secondary predication and against the semantic approach to predication. Most of the evidence to be adduced comes from Spanish. It is posited that secondary predicates are base-generated inside VP in Spanish, confirming Culicover and Wilken's (1984) and Robert's (1988) analysis for English. (40 references)…

Discusses two experiments concerning the generality of shape bias in two and three year olds. The experiments were intended to provide new information about shape bias in children's novel word extensions. Results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. (GLR)

Applies concepts taken from the anthropological study of folk taxonomy to the semantic categorization of the senses in English, concluding that the 11 groups of contrast sets generally support hypotheses about folk taxonomies and present interesting data for cross-cultural comparisons. (five references) (CB)

Presents an analysis of the verb "get," which is portrayed as having different shades of meaning that stand in a noncomplex, semantically motivated relation to each other. The intended result is an explanation of the various uses of "get." (36 references) (JL)

Analysis of the differences in use and meaning of simple verb phrases ("to look") and nominalized phrases ("to have a look") points out that such constructions are not semantically empty, light, or weak, because these structures introduce meanings that are uniquely determined by the basic sense of the verb in question. (40 references) (CB)

Discusses latent semantic analysis (LSA), a statistical model for representing word usage in written language, and describes two experiments that were conducted with undergraduates to determine what aspect of knowledge, conceptual or factual, is being reflected in an LSA output from student essays. (Contains 21 references.)u (Author/LRW)

Offers an examination of the distributional range of causative verbs. Contrary to research claiming these verbs have highly circumscribed distributions, demonstrates that they readily appear in a wide variety of argument structure frames. The appearance of accusative verbs with omitted patient arguments is analyzed in detail and an account is…

The lexical semantic structures of change-of-state verbs are explored by linguistic theory, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Data support the idea that these verbs can be divided into two classes, those for which change of state is internally caused and those for which it is externally caused. (Author/VWL)

Examines how babies exposed to two languages simultaneously acquire the meanings of words across their two languages. Particular focus was on whether babies know that they are acquiring different lexicons right from the start or whether early bilingual exposure causes them to be semantically confused. (Author/VWL)

Investigates the consistency of different newspapers in their choice of words when writing about the same news events based on a study of three Finnish newspapers. Concludes that expression inconsistency is a sign of a retrieval problem and that query expansion based on semantic relationships can significantly improve retrieval performance on free…

This study examined the effects that the acoustic-phonetic structure of a stimulus exerts on the processes by which lexical candidates compete for activation. An auditory lexical decision paradigm was used to investigate whether shortening the VOT of an initial voiceless stop consonant in a real word results in the activation of the…

The goal of this study was to find out how, in young children, conversations with an adult contribute to establishing a shared expression of beliefs through assertive speech acts. Children age 22 months were observed in a picture-book situation with their mother. On the basis of work on early semantic relations, 3 categories of assertives were…

Recognising the grammatical categories of words is a necessary skill for the acquisition of syntax and for on-line sentence processing. The syntactic and semantic context of the word contribute as cues for grammatical category assignment, but phonological cues, too, have been implicated as important sources of information. The value of…

In the present study, a cross-modal semantic priming task was used to investigate the ability of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) nonfluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) control subjects to use a discourse context to resolve lexically ambiguous words. Subjects first heard four-sentence discourse passages ending…

In 4 experiments, the authors found evidence for negatively signed masked semantic priming effects (with category names as primes and exemplars as targets) using a new technique of presenting the masked primes. By rapidly interchanging prime and mask during the stimulus onset asynchrony, they increased the total prime exposure to a level…