This study presents the case of a 9-year-old boy, Jeoffrey, with word-finding difficulties. In an attempt to investigate the cause(s) of these difficulties, an in-depth evaluation of his semantic and phonological skills was carried out, in which lexical and phonological variables such as age of acquisition or phonological complexity were…

Received wisdom in Primary science classroom teaching advocates the use of open questions for elicitation. The socio-cultural perspective on discourse, however, leads one to question the usual classification of questioning by its grammatical formality and leads instead to an analysis of the discourse in the socio-cultural context which includes…

The persistence of the constructivist agenda within learning and developmental theory suggests that underneath the seemingly disparate views of Piagetian, socioculturalist, and ecological perspectives lie some unifying concepts that find their mutual expression in constructivism. The paper contends that semiotics provides the conceptual means to…

A study investigated one segment of toponymy, the study of place names, in Quebec. The first chapter discusses the nature, functions, and functioning of place names from a semiotic-logico-linguistic viewpoint. Chapter two describes the corpus and methodology of the study. Over 900 occurrences of "anse," the French word for…

Defines and explains Alfred Korzybski's theories about general semantics and suggests educational applications. (RB)

Described the methodological problems in setting up a kinesic inventory. Concludes that it is highly unrealistic to study language by itself without analyzing the formal and semantic make-up of the triple basic structure of language-paralanguage-kinesics. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

In this commentary, the authors debate a number of issues associated with literacy and numeracy and with developing a "social" perspective on numeracy, particularly in relation to four points arising from Barwell's intervention: (1) the use of terms mathematics and numeracy; (2) the notion of text as it is applied to these domains; (3)…

Discusses the problems involved in establishing a system of linguistic notation. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

Semiotics addresses the question of how people derive meaning from a text, and meaning stems from considering phenomena as signs and from looking at the relationships among these signs. Thus, a semiological analysis of the television series "Cheers" reveals that the title suggests happiness, good spirits, and companionship. The show…

Despite the uniqueness of each individual's experience, approximate communication is possible in the margin of overlap between the speaker/writer's experience and that of the hearer/reader. This vague phrase, "margin of overlap," can be clarified and given an empirical base through application of the measure of vagueness developed in…

Treating views of communication through consideration of contrasting conceptions of intersubjectivity is possible because the two domains are articulated in different terms and are at the same time closely identified. There are three images of intersubjectivity that reflect the dominant ways in which the dichotomy of the individual and the social…

This essay develops a framework for the application of semiotics to foreign language (FL) pedagogy. The state of the art and rationale of applied semiotics are discussed. The teacher will find that the semiotic approach aids in the teaching of languages by making the student aware of what is going on in a language act and thus, through redundancy,…

In order to discuss the research goals of information science (IS), both its logical and its specific nature must be determined. Peircean logical analysis shows that IS may be classified in three parts: pure science, applied science, and technology. The deficiency in the present state of the art is in the pure science, or theoretical portion, of…

The quality of redundancy in language usage can be examined to determine its effect on communication efficiency. Semiotic redundancy, defined as the quantity of prolixity between semantic and pragmatic information, has the potential of reducing equivocation and error and, at the optimal level, provides maximum communication efficiency. Thus,…

This article discusses methods of teaching literature. A method that derives from the hermeneutic-dialectic school of metascience is outlined, in which the researcher attempts a dialogue with the researched, the goal being mutual and self-understanding. This approach is contrasted with the logical-empirical approach. (CLK)