Presents "Islands," an interactive graphical interface for construction, modification, and management of queries during a search session on a bibliographic database. Discusses motivation and bibliographic search semantics and compares the Islands interface to the Dialog interface. (Author/LRW)

Suggests that, although pragmatic theory is like grammatical theory in that it seeks full explicitness and is pitched at the level of subpersona systems, it is unlike grammatical theory in that it is an account of performance mechanisms rather than of knowledge systems (competence). (Author/VWL)

Describes the implementation of FromTo-CLIR, a Web-based natural-language interface for cross-language information retrieval that was tested with Korean and Japanese. Proposes a method that uses a semantic category tree and collocation to resolve the ambiguity of query translation. (Author/LRW)

Asks what first-order language might be like if there were no way to talk, write, or sign about it--that is, what if there were no second-order metalanguage. By considering the consequences for writing, translation, pragmatics, semantics, and language acquisition and evolution, it is suggested that without second-order, reflexive properties,…

Three experiments assessed the claim that preschoolers override form class cues in the interest of honoring word- meaning assumptions when acquiring new labels. Results demonstrated that children respected the form class cues when these cues and word-meaning assumptions suggested conflicting interpretations. It was suggested that past findings…

Review of studies using the Aging Semantic Differential to measure attitudes toward the elderly identified problems: familiarity and variety of objects, men-only design, and age of the instrument. Ways to refine it include updating adjectives and their positions, identifying attitudinal objects, and accounting for gender differences. (SK)

Discusses the work of William Stokoe who not only made the claim that American Sign Language is in fact language, but who also questioned the view of linguists of the time and built a unique account of the gestural theory of language. Suggests that semantic phonology is the true legacy of Stokoe's lifelong study of language. (Author/VWL)

Suggests that various parts of the grammar of American Sign Language--particularly its verb and pronoun system--give convincing evidence that such grammar cannot have derived from the grammars of spoken languages; rather the continuity is from cognitive activity expressed in gSigns toward linguistic organization both of the expressive material and…

Discusses latent semantic indexing (LSI); considers the high cost associated with the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the large term-by-document matrix that becomes a barrier for its application to scalable information retrieval; and shows that information filtering using level search techniques can reduce the SVD computation cost for LSI.…

Outlines a new approach to teaching prepositions and directional adverbs based on work by Brugman (1981) and Lakoff (1987). The article aims to familiarize readers with the gist of prototype semantics as applied to prepositions, and to suggest pedagogical applications and benefits, with particular reference to the word "on." (15 references)…

This study used semantic relations expressed in text, particularly cause-effect relations, to improve information retrieval effectiveness. Investigated whether information obtained by matching cause-effect relations expressed in documents with the cause-effect relations expressed in users' queries can be used to improve retrieval results, in…

It has been observed that phonological phrasing in Shanghai Chinese distinguishes certain determiners from others and wh-quantifier phrases from non-wh-quantifier phrases. This article shows that such phonological phrasing distinctions are also found in Hokkien Chinese but in a more restricted environment. (Author/VWL)

Four lexical features of a noun are relevant to agreement: semantic conditions on reference; person, number, and gender features of the referential index; concord features; and declension class. These features are correlated by a chain of binary constraints. Patterns of mixed agreement result from individual violations to the constraints. Three…

Investigates how the noun and verb classes develop in the free speech of a French child between the ages of 1 year, 2 months to 2 years and 6 months from the perspective of semantic and grammatical development. Analyses indicate that in French acquisition, nouns clearly predominate over verbs until 20 months of age at least, but that verbs are…

Discuses the adverbialization of two roughly synonymous present-day English intensifiers, "pretty" and "fairly." Based on electronic corpora, a quantitative analysis of their long-term history is provided using the framework of adverb functions proposed by Quirk et al (1995). (Author/VWL)