The "roadworthiness" of literal meaning is tested in this essay, which involves a review of some influential views of literal meaning and related categories advanced by Searle and other pragmaticists, from the standpoint of integrational linguistics. Implications of an integrational perspective need to be reflected in theorizing about…

The term "adult education" was used in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Melvil Dewey developed a typology of adult education, and Henry Leipziger promoted New York City's Free Lectures program as an institute of liberal adult education. Leipziger's advocacy was largely responsible for the diffusion of the new term in its…

Describes the impact of the tools being developed as part of the Second Generation Instructional Design (ID2) Research Program on the process of instructional design. Highlights include domain semantic meaning; instructional design expert systems; rapid prototyping; the instructional systems development process; and the ID2 rapid prototyping…

Discourse or conversation analysis represents a new direction for understanding the nature of social interaction during the supervisory (or peer) instructional conference. Discourse analysis may be a key to mechanisms involved in institutional management and individual improvement. Supervisors cannot assume that successful conferences necessarily…

Three experiments presented nonsense verbs to two-year-olds either in syntactic isolation or embedded within a transitive syntactic frame. Found that children had identifiable action biases in the absence of syntactic information and that these biases were shifted by the addition of a transitive syntactic frame. (MDM)

The nominal imperative, which serves to give an order in nominal rather than verbal form (e.g., "Silence!") presents a little-studied case of alternation between presence and absence of determiner in a nominal syntagm. Analysis of a French language corpus allows development of hypotheses on the meaning of certain types of determiners, or…

If it is immediate, definite anaphoric reference of an indefinite syntagm "'un'+noun" in French (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") seems appropriate for an "unfaithful anaphor" (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") but not a "faithful" anaphor (e.g., "un chien...le chien"). This rule helps to identify…

Analysis of the indicative-subjunctive alternation in the compliment of interrogative utterances with the verb "creer" shows that the "modality of reserved epistemic" determines choice of subjunctive. This determination contributes to a hypothesis about the nature of the subjunctive in Spanish. (CP)

Concentrates on one area of discourse relations, the concession family, identifying its underlying semantics and pragmatics. Proposes (on the basis of extensive corpus studies) a new classification of concession markers in English and German. Suggests a generation model for producing bilingual text that can incorporate marker choice into its…

Proposes a model to account for the uses to which the individual puts formulaic language, and specifically, what determines the choice for that person of a holistic or analytic processing strategy at any given moment. Formulaic language is used to describe a phenomenon that encompasses various types of wordstrings that appear to be stored and…

Study analyzed interviews to identify children's terminology of private body parts and sexual abuse activity. "Touching" was the most frequently used term in describing sexual parts and/or sexual abuse. Children's choice of words can imply various meanings; the interview should clarify the meaning of slang terms. Recommends interviewers use "what"…

Argues that intervocalic [b] in the sound-symbolic stratum of old Japanese was a unique counter-measure that preserved a significant phono-semantic contrast on the face of the historical weakening process of labials. Suggests that this piece of evidence can be used to asses the phonological status of intervocalic voicing in early Japanese.…

Shows that children (mean age 4 years and 4 months) not only know the meaning and use of complex reciprocal anaphors like "each other," but that they also have knowledge of subtle differences in the possible interpretations of such anaphors depending on the type of predicates involved. (Author/VWL)

Investigates to what extent the variability between "siempre" and "todo el tiempo" in the San Antonio dialect demonstrates semantic convergence between them, and whether there will be a selection of the innovating form for the future. Examination of this variability may illuminate questions of how such changes occur…

Accounts for the observation that in a broad range of genetically unrelated languages two classes of direct objects are found that are based on their semantic and syntactic properties. Specifically, splits are found in case marking, object position, and the ability of the object to trigger verb agreement. Proposes that this split in object…