Kinship systems and their place in language are discussed. (RM)

Polar interrogative sentences differ from declarative sentences in terms of illocutionary forces and the linguistic analysis of their meaning. It is possible to isolate small numbers of syntactic and semantic categories and an unlimited number of illocutionary forces resulting from their interaction with the total situation. (CK)

In two studies, systematic semantic manipulations were made on a noun for unmodified transitive sentences which underwent active to passive transformations in a communicatively sterile context, and variations of animatedness on the noun constituted significant semantic properties in perceiving sentences that underwent transformation. (Author/KM)

It is argued that among English sensation referents there is a primacy of vision referents for syntactic, semantic and morphological phenomena. (RM)

A bilingual dictionary must be more accurate in definitions than a monolingual. This paper touches on problems of transference between languages, linguistic "cannibalism," and lexical versus connotative meaning. (CK)

A study investigated the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs in sentences: specifically, the phenomenon of meaning adjustment under semantic strain, in an effort to discover whether there are orderly processes of adjustment, and if so, to describe them. The study comprised three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2, tested the hypothesis that…

A strategy is presented for explaining (and discerning) subtle differences in two words that appear to be semantic twins in one context but are not interchangeable in another context. This strategy suggests the following: (1) list several phrases that contain one of the problem words, then swap the second word for the first; (2) examine the…

The two major schools of thought concerned with the meaning of proper names, i.e., the direct-reference or referrential/causal theory, and the description theory, are outlined, and new arguments are presented for a strong version of the second of these theories. The referential theory takes the meaning of the name as being the same as its…

A discussion of verb intransitivization in English grammar looks at different verb classes that allow or do not allow this phenomenon. The semantic primitive of involvement is a phenomenon that attempts to find related features in sentences where intransitivization occurs. Semantic involvement patterns are assigned in the subject or direct object…

English, and presumably any natural language, contains a small group of expressions referring to species of things found in nature. These species are defined by their internal structure, determined by genetics in the case of living things and by chemical or physical properties in the case of others. The reference of these terms is determined by…

This English-Tibetan dictionary contains 16,000 main entries and subentries, a total of 45,000 lexical items. The dictionary is primarily oriented to spoken communication and was designed to be semantically sensitive, bridging the semantic gap between Tibetan and English. Tibetan terms corresponding to submeanings of English subterms are…

Data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e.g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering which results from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth has uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have yet to be carefully analyzed and…

The article treats two central doctrines of behaviorism, namely, peripheralism and associationism, as doctrines which place semantic and syntactical constraints on acceptable language for the discussion of human beings, and assesses the consequences of these doctrines for the description of educational goals and methods. (Author)

Examines the ways in which the meanings of words are changed through usage. (RB)