This glossing system is designed to fill the gap between grammar studies and reading. The system reflects flexional and derivational morphology of words as well as lexical relationships of synonymy, antonymy, homonymy and structural similarity and polysemy. It is intended to help students learn and understand vocabulary for successful reading.…

The experimental freshman English course described here weds the teaching of basic reading and writing skills to an introduction to the humanities. Although the semester course is divided into four discrete and sequential mini-courses (semantics, philosophy, history, and myth), the units together develop a common and unifying theme of freedom.…

Male undergraduate volunteers (N=27) were interviewed by nine male counseling students using an intake interview. Each student counselor saw three subjects, one in each of three counselor-client distance conditions: 18 inches, 30 inches, and 48 inches. Subjects' degree of comfort scores ranged from highest for 30 inches to lowest for 18 inches…

A method is proposed for formalizing the basic meanings underlying the forms of verbs which contain future reference. The method proposed is intended as a contribution to pedagogical grammar rather than theoretical linguistics. See FL 508 197 for availability. (Author/RM)

Boundaries in running speech are not all equally obvious acoustically. The research reported here is concerned with identifying the acoustic characteristics that trigger the listener's response to boundary signals. The eventual goal is to establish the relevance of the boundary to the syntactic and semantic structure of the message. (Author/TL)

Foreign language instruction, particularly the learning of new vocabulary, could greatly benefit from the structural description of semantic fields. Examples are provided. (Text is in German.) (DS)

The separation of the mechanics of rhetoric from the ethics of rhetoric has had disastrous consequences, in education and in our public life. (JH)

Analysis of the factors that make a text coherent or non-coherent suggests that total coherence requires cohesion not only on the textual surface but on the semantic level as well. Syntactic evidence of non-coherence includes lack of formal agreement blocking a potential cross-reference, anaphoric and cataphoric references that do not follow their…

A study examined how teachers help students to write with greater precision. Subjects, 160 freshman students, wrote a single sentence describing a wordless Peanuts cartoon. They were asked to express specific semantic relationships (sequence/cotemporality, intention/instrument, and intention/enablement) between the actions in two contrasting…

Two studies were performed to determine the process used by young children to figure out the meaning of a new word. It was hypothesized that the children would use one of two strategies: (1) ignore the word and wait for more information, or learn only what is unambiguous about it, or (2) make a reasonable but uncertain guess, quickly setting up…

In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

The relationship of one aspect of conversational style, the degree of directness in the sending and interpretation of messages, to ethnicity was investigated in a comparison of the communication styles of Greeks and Americans. It was hypothesized that Greeks tend to be more indirect in speech than Americans, and that English speakers of Greek…

In order to account for the ways in which combined and decombined sentences work, and to determine why some texts are perceived as being well-written and others are perceived as poor and ineffective, 11 texts were selected for distribution to students for ranking, all on the same topic--the Civil War. Overall, students ranked Bruce Catton's "Grant…

A common error in children's attempts to solve verbal analogies is to respond with a word strongly associated with the third term in the analogy. This is known as associative response. A study was conducted to investigate the cognitive processes underlying this response. Subjects, 112 fifth grade students, were administered a battery of tests…