There is an obvious morphological relationship between complex words such as "man-eater and self-locking" and phrases such as "eats men and locks itself." The perception of derivation suggests semantic relatedness and provides evidence for the notion of analytic synonymy and by extension, analytic hyponymy. However, judgments…

An analysis of Hebrew topicalization looks at the normal or unmarked function of topicalization in narrative discourse and considers the additional contextual effects that marked or apparently redundant instances of topicalization are intended to achieve. Focus is on the fronting of elements in sentences with topic-comment articulation. It is…

A study examined the developmental shifts in the importance of linguistic components of words to single word decoding. Subjects, 1200 children ages 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12.5 years who were the normative sample of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC), were tested using a word recognition test, the Reading Decoding Subtest of the K-ABC.…

Designed to divide recall protocols for subsequent category analysis, this instrument equates surface syntactic forms with semantic ideas. The instrument defines two types of syntactic proposition--a base syntactic proposition, the simplest independent prediction (structurally) that may be used to convey information, and an alternate syntactic…

After the Comanche Indians split from the Shoshoni-Comanche in the early eighteenth century, the Comanche language underwent several subtle changes in the use and position of directional suffixes. The use of two directional suffixes (-kin, meaning "motion toward" and -kwan, meaning "motion away") illustrates these changes. In…

Analysis of examples of abstract and concrete nouns reveals that pluralization in Spanish is a complex phenomenon from the semantic point of view. The number of abstract negative nouns being pluralized far outweighs that of their positive counterparts. Syntactic pluralization of abstracts implies a semantic change, and sometimes the pluralization…

A discussion of pragmatics looks at and compares a variety of statement types in Macedonian and French. Based on the assumption that the most important semantic and syntactic elements are presented by the speakers themselves as well as by the temporal and spatial markers, the function of the statement form is examined. Focus is on the use of the…

Structures in which nouns modify nouns have raised questions about the form and functioning of generative grammars. By applying and extending Jackendoff's X-bar theory of phrase structure, the syntactic properties of two types of pre-noun modifiers, adjectives and nouns, can be examined. X-bar analysis correctly predicts many features of noun-noun…

An analysis of stress and intonation patterns in Swedish is presented in the context of lexical phonology. The theories of lexical, metrical, and autosegmental phonology are outlined, and a brief review of Swedish stress and tone patterns is presented. The nature of Swedish stress, the interaction of stress rules with length and morphology, the…

To determine the utility of the commonly taught phonics rule "if the only vowel in a word is at the end of that word, it usually stands for a long sound," a study evaluated all of the single syllable entries in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." When the letter "y" was considered a vowel, 72 words were…

To determine the usefulness of two commonly taught phonics rules concerning the pronounciation of two-syllable words, a study analyzed more than 138,000 words in the "New Grolier Webster International Dictionary of the English Language." The rules state that (1) a vowel is short when the only vowel in a syllable is not the last letter in…

A discussion of the treatment of suffixes in Korean linguistic theory argues that, in view of recent clitic typology, Korean case markers and verbal suffixes are better analyzed in lexical rather than in syntactic terms. Evidence for this approach is found in phonological phenomena, morpheme and allomorph selection, and compounding. The most…

A study investigated the inferential processing involved in the comprehension of a class of complex predicates (such as "remember to,""manage to,""fail to," and "neglect to") that are known as implicative. The subjects, 64 college students, were timed while they drew inferences from syntactically affirmative…

A study was conducted to define the linguistic and discourse parameters of text difficulty from the point of view of both the reader and the text in order to redefine readability and to provide an operational way of explaining processing difficulties of the near-mature reader. Subjects were 14-year-old students in the United States and the United…

Across languages, clauses expressing possession, location, and existence exhibit many similarities. To capture their evident affinity, it is often claimed that possessives derive--synclironically or diaclironically--from expressions of location/existence. This localist account obscures a basic contrast between two broad classes of possessive…