In discussing the views of leading linguistics on the specific features of Slavic negation, the author reviews mainly Czech material and compares it with Russian and English works. This paper is part of a larger work on negation in which it is argued that a language system is a dynamic system based on oppositions (with predominant binary…

The paper presents a set of linguistic phenomena illustrative of the notion "universal tendency". Linguistic generalizations are regarded here not as isolated, "true-or-false" propositions but as embedded in a hierarchy of competing forces. An "exception" to a universal is thus seen as the result of the prevalence of another conflicting universal…

Analyzed was the verbal content of 20 institutionalized and 20 non-institutionalized retarded (mean IQ 64) children (mean age 10.7 years) matched for age and IQ to examine the hypothesis that sociological and psychological deficits exist for the institutionalized children and are reflected in language content. Unstructured speech samples were…

In three experiments undergraduates were presented with eight adjective-noun phrases within a paired-associate list context in the orders adjective-noun and noun-adjective and instructed that either word would be given as a cue for recall. The same phrases were presented within a prose context where recall was tested by the cloze procedure. In the…

Six passages were used in this study to investigate the recoding behavior of eighth and ninth grade students for both increase and decrease in syntactic complexity and thus gain a more accurate picture of their grammar. Each of the two selections used was written in kernel sentences at the eighth grade level of writing and the skilled adult level…

This book contains the edited papers from the eleventh International Conference on General Semantics, titled "A Search for Relevance." The conference questioned, as a central theme, the relevance of general semantics in a world of wars and human misery. Reacting to a fundamental Korzybski-ian principle that man's view of reality is…

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a rewriting instrument in French that would be a valid indicator of the level of syntactic development of American students in French. Vocabulary is limited to those words found in the first level of "Ecouter et Parler;" only the present tense was used in the tests. The theory on which the tests…

The papers included in this volume discuss the relationship of sociolinguistics to social interaction, sociolinguistic surveys, the intersection of sociolinguistics with education, and the influence of linguistics and sociology on sociolinguistics. The papers include: "Optional Rules in Grammar" (Fraser); "The Structure of Polylectal Grammars"…

This study identified structural units of language as they appeared in the speech of two- to five-year-old preschool white children in Brisbane. Electronic equipment was used to record the speech samples, which were transformed into three separate language concordances by computer analysis. These structural units of language were then compared…

Research has been conducted regarding the linguistic structure of children's language usage. There has not, however, been an attempt to relate children's knowledge of vocabulary to their teachers' use of vocabulary. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the vocabulary used by teachers and the proportion of that…

It is possible to apply Lamb's stratificational theory and analysis to English graphonomy, but additional notation devices must be used to explain particular graphemes and their characteristics. The author presents cases where Lamb's notation is inadequate. In those cases, he devises new means for performing the analysis. The result of this…

This paper presents two views on the categorization of Japanese nouns, verbs, and adjectives into form classes: the traditional view and a view set forth in the writing of Suzuki Akira. The fundamental issue here is the criterion for categorization. Is it the meaning of words, or is it their grammatical behavior that determines the system of…

This paper emphasizes the need for empirical research and objective discovery procedures in semantics, and illustrates a method by which these goals may be obtained. The aim of the methodology described is to provide a description of the internal structure of a semantic field by eliciting the description--in an objective, standardized manner--from…

This research studied the processes which enable people to acquire semantic information from natural-language discourse. Specific objectives were: (1) to represent semantically the structural meaning of English discourse by a well-defined semantic model; (2) to develop a way of using the semantic representation of a text as a structural model for…

Ludwig Wittgenstein's pragmatic conception of language, his theory on language learning, and his treatment of the function of language in the growth of the child are the focus of this book. Wiggenstein's study of language is compared with those made by linguists, psychologists, and sociologists, and accounts of language learning based on empirical…