The production and understanding of humor calls for a specific competence. It appears that second language learners fail to develop this competence even when they reach native-like proficiency levels. A review of the literature suggests that the notion of humor competence in second language learning has not been examined. Humor competence can be…

Definiteness and indefiniteness are usually seen as essentially a matter of lexical semantics, in that whether a noun phrase (NP) is definite or indefinite depends on the choice of determiner. It may be more accurate to say that the position of the determiners within phrase structure configurations may correlate with the definite/indefinite…

This study examines the use in Japanese of verb forms containing -(r)are in syntactical expressions. The meaning and function of the adversative passive and its behavior vis-a-vis the non-adversative or plain passive is discussed, and the related non-derived constructions and their relationships to the adversative passive are analyzed. Finally the…

Four mothers and their language handicapped children (2-4 years old) were compared with four mothers and their normal language children. Mother-child interactions were tape recorded and analyzed for semantic, syntactic, and morphologic complexity. The normal language group had more sophisticated semantic, syntactic, and morphologic abilities than…

A discussion of the application of artificial intelligence to natural language processing looks at several problems in language comprehension, involving semantic ambiguity, anaphoric reference, and metonymy. Examples of these problems are cited, and the importance of the computational approach in analyzing them is explained. The approach applies…

Recent developments in cognitive anthropology, in particular the development of ethnographic semantics, make ethnographic methods more systematic. The goal is to replace intuition with an operationally explicit methodology for discerning how people construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it. The first part of this paper…

The effect of counselors' level of experience on clients' expression of feeling has not been investigated using stylistic and semantic measures. To examine the influence of affectively oriented counselors' level of experience, six counselors at three experience levels (low--masters, counseling practicum students; medium--doctoral, counseling…

Although Mandarin Chinese is a topic-prominent language, it is shown that young children acquiring Chinese as their first language access the concept of grammatical subject as well as that of topic. A total of 95 children aged 2-5 years acquiring Mandarin Chinese as their first language were tested on sentences involving equi-constructions. It was…

When education (teaching and/or learning) is considered to be an art, then it seems obvious that the methods of artistic inquiry would be appropriate analysis techniques. Such analysis seems to be rare or non-existent in educational technology. Semiotics, the theory of signs, provides one such set of methodologies for examining text. This…

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

Arguments in favor of a particular decompositional approach to word meaning are presented and contrasted with other theories. The approach in question uses semantic markers to represent word meanings. The semantic marker analysis of English causative verbs is outlined and illustrated, showing how such an analysis could account for the semantic…

A study of 21 patients with Alzheimer's Disease and 25 with vascular dementia, the two most common forms of dementia, investigated language impairments in the dementia syndrome to see if analysis of language disturbances is helpful in differential diagnosis. Diagnostic assessment included a neurological examination, detailed medical history,…

Two experiments examined the effects on recall of encoding and retrieval "depth" (the extent to which subjects process the semantic as well as the phonetic and orthographic attributes of verbal material), encoding-retrieval cue compatability, and subject versus experimenter generation of cues. In the first experiment, 117 undergraduates, divided…

To integrate many of the theoretical linguistic studies examining pronoun reference, this paper focuses on tracing the shift from purely transformational syntactic studies of intrasentential phenomena to the wider orientations of discourse and pragmatic studies. The first section describes the classic studies of pronominalization within the…

The basis for acquisition of categories in child language was investigated. The early encoding of the distinction between mass and count nouns was examined to determine whether children categorize them on the basis of semantic type or syntactic regularities. An experiment was designed in which semantic and syntactic cues were in competition:…