English, and presumably any natural language, contains a small group of expressions referring to species of things found in nature. These species are defined by their internal structure, determined by genetics in the case of living things and by chemical or physical properties in the case of others. The reference of these terms is determined by…

This English-Tibetan dictionary contains 16,000 main entries and subentries, a total of 45,000 lexical items. The dictionary is primarily oriented to spoken communication and was designed to be semantically sensitive, bridging the semantic gap between Tibetan and English. Tibetan terms corresponding to submeanings of English subterms are…

Data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e.g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering which results from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth has uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have yet to be carefully analyzed and…

The article treats two central doctrines of behaviorism, namely, peripheralism and associationism, as doctrines which place semantic and syntactical constraints on acceptable language for the discussion of human beings, and assesses the consequences of these doctrines for the description of educational goals and methods. (Author)

Examines the ways in which the meanings of words are changed through usage. (RB)

Describes the campaign by the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Public Doublespeak to expose and denounce self-serving, deceptive, and sloppy uses of English. Also discusses the dangerous political and social implications of chronic language misuse by public officials, especially educators. (JG)

Concerns the language development of four children between the ages of 19 and 26 months, as they progressed from single-word utterances to a mean length of utterance of 2.5 morphemes. The observed developmental sequence is described and possible linguistic and cognitive explanations for it are discussed.

Uses experimental evidence to define three stages in infants' pre-speech development: perlocutionary, illocutionary, and locutionary. (ED)

The factive nominal construction of Spanish shows to what extent semantic notions and syntactic constraints are mutually influential. Positive presupposition on the part of the speaker as to truth or falsehood of a subordinate proposition is reflected by the use of the indicative mood; negative or indefinite presupposition by use of the…

The metainformational approach represents some attempts to transform the implicit retrieval information contained in primary documents to an explicit information structure. (Author/PF)

Synonyms are not in syntactic free-variation. Some text composition rules are examined and it is shown that they prevent the occurrence of paradoxical utterances which could arise if synonyms were freely substitutable. (Text is in German.) (TL)

This paper discusses the interrelations between the three aspects of semiotics - semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Topics covered include the structure of semiotics, foundations of the category of sign, the centrality of pragmatics, relations between semiotics and linguistics, and between semiotics and the theory of art. (CK)

This is a survey of the evolution of Quebec French over the last twenty years away from anglicizations and toward a modernization which has a tendency to lessen the gap between it and International French. Examples are given of recent "refrancizations"; and reasons for, and obstacles to, this phenomenon are discussed. (Text is in…