Punctuation is not necessary in a sentence if a pair of adjacent words suggests an intentional conceptual relationship. However, when the pair suggests a relationship that is not a part of the intended communication, the writer must alert the reader, so some punctuation is necessary. When members of an adjacent pair do not suggest a plausible…

Lexical semantics deals with the determination and description of the semantic knowledge or structure embodied in the lexicon. A description of lexical structure focuses on the meaning of a single lexical item in terms of its place in a structure consisting of related lexical items. This study concerns Japanese and English verbs of judging with…

Some results are reported of an investigation into the meanings of the English modal auxiliary verbs. The corpus consisted of the one million word Brown University corpus of American English and a matching Lancaster University corpus of British English. The three factors operative in the study were: (1) contextual features, that is, co-occurring…

This study focuses on meaning differentiation among different causative expressions. Semantic differences between lexical and periphrastic expressions are reviewed. A picture comprehension task was administered to 32 adults and 99 children between the ages of 32 and 70 months. The children were asked to select the picture that matched a sentence…

Teaching composition as involving merely syntax and paragraph structure has no clear relation to an education in the liberal arts or to significant growth in understanding. Work in mechanics needs to be subordinated to the communicative and logological (how words act rather than their content) functions of language. One hopeful approach to…

Seven computer programs were written for use with the semantic differential and two additional programs were modified or expanded. The nine programs can compute the following: means, standard deviations, and standard errors on nine subscales and on evaluation, potency, and activity factors (EPA); Osgood D values for all concepts; correlations…

This paper provides a review of some basic general semantic principles and then applies them to the area of prenatal classes and labor room practices. It first presents an overview of the principle that language is not a neutral factor in human perceptions but an active, reactive force. Next, it looks at the relationship between language and…

Limitations of linguistic theories of translation are outlined and an argument is presented for the inclusion of an evaluation component in a comprehensive theory of translation. The tasks which a linguistic theory of translation sets for itself are formulated since these provide an ad hoc set of criteria for testing the adequacy of the various…

A study of 141 hearing impaired students (ages 8 to 18 years) was conducted to assess how common gender neutral terms (such as "someone,""people,""student," and "child'" are understood by such students. The influence of multiple factors that might relate to hearing impaired children's processing of gender neutral terms was examined by means of a…

This paper describes an intelligent decision support system for information on petroleum resources and use currently being designed by the Information Methodology Research Project as the first step in the development of a comprehensive intelligent information system for dealing with energy resources in the United States. The system draws on…

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS IN INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS OF TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS IS THE INTERPRETATION OF WORDS USED TO INDEX DOCUMENTS. SEMANTIC TOOLS, DEFINED AS CHANNELS FOR THE COMMUNICATION OF WORD MEANINGS BETWEEN TECHNICAL EXPERTS, DOCUMENT INDEXERS, AND SEARCHERS, PROVIDE ONE METHOD OF DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM OF MULTIPLE…

IN AGREEMENT WITH CHOMSKY, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES SELECTIONAL RESTRICTIONS ON SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS BASED ON CRITERIA OF WHAT MUST OR CANNOT OCCUR IN THOSE SLOTS IN A SENTENCE. THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF INTERDEPENDENCY RELATIONSHIPS, VARIOUS DEEP- AND SURFACE-STRUCTURE FEATURES ARE DISTINGUISHED CONCERNING TRANSITIVE VERBS AND THE INTERPRETATION OF…

Psychological research concerning several aspects of the relationship between existing knowledge schemata and the processing of text is summarized in this report. The first section is concerned with dynamic processes of story understanding, with emphasis on the integration of information. The role of prior knowledge in accommodating parts of…

A sentence "pragmatically implies" another sentence when information in the first sentence leads the hearer to expect something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied by the original sentence. Thus, the sentence "The safe-cracker put the match to the fuse" pragmatically implies that "the safe-cracker lit…

This paper is directed toward a traditional problem in the analysis of texts, that of finding meaningful linguistic units that are larger than a sentence and smaller than the text itself. Two principles are given for finding extended temporal structures based on the temporal expressions that occur in sentences: a sentence can be captured to form…