This paper describes and tests a two-stage model for a "semantic congruity effect" in comparative judgments. (Editor)

Different theories of semantic fields are discussed and different types of semantic fields explained. (RM)

Reference is made to a 1973 article of Singer and Rosenberg regarding linguistic integration. Some of their arguments are supported, and certain claims about integration clarified. (RM)

Research is reported investigating the processes involved in rejecting certain false categorical statements. (RM)

Argues that general semantics courses should be taught in high school and outlines the content that should be emphasized in such a course. (RB)

Reviews articles by Allen Walker Read and Merriam-Webster's Editor-in-Chief Gove on dictionaries. Problems discussed are boundaries of the lexicon, regional usage, commercial dictionaries, ordering of lexemes, establishing meaning, providing grammatical information, semantics, and editorial bias. (MSE)

This paper employs a phenomenological theory of human communication to re-examine several thematic concerns which were addressed in an article by Paul Watzlawick (1977) on the pathologies of "perfectionism"--an article which was, principally, an indictment of Marxism as a pathological, utopian (or perfectionist) manner of thinking. Given…

This book contains 25 essays about English words, and how they are defined, valued, and discussed. The book is divided into four sections. The first section, "Language Lore," examines some of the myths and misconceptions that affect attitudes toward language--and towards English in particular. The second section, "Language…

Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical noun phrases (NPs) such as "her, herself, and each other." Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent. A model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of such referentially dependent NPs is presented. These…

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…