IF YOUNGSTERS ARE TO BE HELPED AND TO BE OFFERED EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY, THE TAGS, MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND MYTHS WHICH HAVE BLOCKED PAST PATHS TO PROGRESS MUST BE DISCARDED AND AVOIDED. THE TERM, "CULTURAL DEPRIVATION" CARRIES WITH IT A CONTRADICTION IN MEANINGS. IT SUGGESTS, VERY INCORRECTLY, THAT A CULTURE CAN OF ITSELF BE…

GENERAL SEMANTICS CAN BE TAUGHT TO YOUNG CHILDREN BY EMPLOYING EXPERIMENTATION, ROLE PLAYING, AND ACTIVE DISCUSSION OF PERSONAL REACTIONS. THE CHILDREN ARE SHOWN HOW VERBAL EXPRESSIONS CAN BE USED TO REFLECT ACCURACY OR DISTORTION IN WHAT IS DESIRED TO BE EXPRESSED. CERTAIN FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES EMPHASIZED ARE--(1) THE WORLD CONSISTS OF PROCESSES…

SEVERAL EXPLORATIONS WERE MADE INTO THE STRUCTURE OF MEANING IN BURMESE AND RUSSIAN. VARIOUS KINDS OF LINGUISTIC INFORMATION WERE ISOLATED BY TEXTUAL STUDY AND INTERVIEWS WITH NATIVE SPEAKERS. DISCUSSION COVERED SUCH THEORETICAL QUESTIONS AS (1) SYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY, (2) SEMANTICS AND GRAMMAR, (3) SEMANTICS AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE, (4) SEMANTICS…

A study extended word association methodology beyond isolated word stimuli to investigate the effects of written context on the meanings that proficient readers impart to words. A repeated-measures design was used to assess the responses of 62 sixth grade readers to target words at three levels: no context, limited context, and expanded context.…

In Black English (BE), in addition to the motion verb "come," there exists a modal-like "come" which expresses speaker indignation. This "come" is comparable to other modal-like forms, identical to motion verbs, which occur in Black and non-Black varieties of English, and which signal various degrees of disapproval.…

While it is fashionable to use the semantic pun in advertising (for example, the meaning extension in "dollars and sense"), a lot of this humor slips past the American reader; not only unintentional bloopers that get past the proofreader but also intentional puns that escape the audience. Advertising humor has other pitfalls as well--the…

A major concern in recent research is whether perceptual or functional information is of primary importance in children's early word meanings. In the study described here, artificial objects were used so that form and function could be independently manipulated. There were 57 subjects, ranging in age from 2.5 years to adulthood. The subjects were…

A general semantics perspective of science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt is presented in this paper. The first major section of the paper contains a biographical sketch of van Vogt and traces the influence of A. Korzybski's work on general semantics, "Science and Sanity," on his writing, while the second major section provides an…

Three experiments were conducted to determine how children assign meaning to a multiple-meaning word in a sentence context. Fourth-grade children were given sentences in which a key word carried a meaning other than its "primary," or most familiar, meaning. Two types of multiple choice questions could then follow: in the first type, the secondary,…

A theory for representation of concepts in memory is proposed which emphasizes the association of salient exemplars with the concept. Previous theories dealing with the classification processes involved in acquiring new concepts have shown that clear category boundaries do not exist. It is proposed that present theory must account for the…

Contrastive analysis can help solve certain problems in translation, for example, that of idioms. A contrastive analysis of source language (SL) and target language (TL) might have as its theoretical framework a contrastive lexical analysis based on generative semantics. In this approach both SL and TL idioms are broken down into their semantic…

Forty Swedish university students produced sentences from homographs that could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of polysemy (multiple meaning). The results indicated that the subjects prefered verb productions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the…

The natural process of learning language is to concentrate on what we mean, not only on how we are saying it. What we mean is dependent upon the context in which we speak. This context in turn depends on the society or the speech-community in which our speech act takes place. To be a member of a speech community is to know what language behavior…

From an outline of the recent history of the psychology of language the author proceeds to discuss research that has been done recently in psycholinguistics. These studies fall within the following areas: (1) "The Study of Grammar as a Psychological Process," (2) "How We Remember Sentences," (3) "What We Do When We…

This high-school students' handbook on linguistics and the English language is the second of a two-volume series (see AL 001 318). This revised edition does not follow the order of table of contents in Volume I, but consists of the following units--(1) pronunciation and spelling, (2) syntax, (3) punctuation and suprasegmentals, and (4) meaning and…