The use of "some" and "any" does not depend solely on syntactic factors (sentence type), as hitherto taught, but also on the speaker's expectation and other pragmatic elements and on semantic factors not limited to those of quantification. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A nation's language is on the order of a natural resource--subject, like the other, to depletion, the ravages of pollution, thoughtless neglect. Suggests the development of an American Academy like unto the French Academy which would diligently establish "sure rules to our language, rendering it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and…

Study examined causal priorities between comprehension subskills in three types of readers and found that for most readers word meanings do serve as building blocks of paragraph meaning.

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)

To test the hypothesis that meaning of a sentence is represented in an abstract format rather than one mediated by words or images, 96 spoken sentences were immediately followed by a word or drawing probe. It was concluded that sentence or probe meaning is represented in an abstract conceptual format. (CHK)

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

One possibility explored in the present study is that semantic encoding and, consequently, the usefulness of interitem relations in recall depend not only on attention to meaning but also on the particular attributes of meaning on which one's attention is focused during study of the words. (Author)

Reinterprets the findings of Kim "et al" (1994), who argue that the preference children and adults show for regular inflection for verbs and nouns with novel meanings should be attributed to their grammatically based sensitivity to the derivations of these verbs and nouns. This article argues for a semantic/functional instead of a grammatical…

Discussion of software reusability focuses on classification and retrieval problems and proposes a method based on encoding semantic information to help solve those problems. Highlights include representation of semantic information; quiddity; the SRM (software resource model) and SRD (software resource diagram); and results of experiments with…

Discussion of models for indexing and searching information resources on the Internet focuses on the results of a simple query on a number of existing search systems and on two proposed index metadata structures for indexing and supporting search and discovery: the Dublin Core Elements List and the Semantic Header. (52 references) (Author/LRW)

Studies predominant types and patterns of awkward sentences in student writing. Suggests that four types of syntactic problems--mismanagement of clause structure in errors of embedding, of syntax shift, of parallel structure, and of direct/indirect speech--are associated with patterns of semantic problems. Suggests pedagogical approaches for these…

The role of prosodic breaks (PB) in the parsing of locally ambiguous noun phrases (NP) + verb (V) + NP + prepositional phrase (PP) was examined in four word-monitoring experiments. Results indicate that PBs can influence sentence parsing. The article discusses possible mechanisms in the framework of two models. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Suggests that there are universal constraints that explain the so-called "Definiteness Effect," i.e., the fact that certain constructions do not allow for definite arguments in certain positions. The article founds its proposal on the analysis of data from Hungarian and English. (15 references) (Author/CK)

Discusses the intricacies of text analysis as approached by computer-assisted corpus linguistics, focusing on meaning relations in the text. The article points out that it is possible to distinguish several different approaches, according to whether the focus is on intralingual or interlingual parallel texts. (12 references) (Author/CK)

Examined the existence of preschoolers' assumption of one-proper-name-to-one-individual in their word learning. Subjects were 90 4-year olds. Found that children were likely to interpret a word as a proper name if it was applied to one instead of two objects. However, children overrode this default assumption if sufficient contextual information…