The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms,…

Grammatical description of the sentence generation for the particular language is usually split into special morphological and Syntactical modules applied autonomously: the variance of morphological forms posed into the enumeration of constructional augmentations produces the enormous list of possible expositions of structural complexity paying no…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

Deep cases representing the significant meaning of nouns in sentences play a crucial role in semantic analysis. However, a case tends to be manually identified because it requires understanding the meaning and relationships of words. To address this problem, we propose a method to predict deep cases by analyzing the relationship between nouns,…

Up to two-thirds of African languages have a system of noun classification of some sort. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the noun class system of the Dagaare and Akan languages based more on an interaction between morphology and phonology than on semantics. Dagaare and Akan are two West African languages that exhibit mainly suffixal…

Analysis of the cofunctional relationship between common nouns and adjectives in English is examined in terms of the principle of semantic copredication. It is proposed that a formalized semantic metalanguage system can be constructed to demonstrate that some English adjectives behave like common nouns. Numerous examples are provided throughout…

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…

Children's acquisition of the mass-count distinction in English was investigated. In order to determine whether children approach the distinction as a morphosyntactic or a semantic distinction, 88 monolingual children aged 3-9 years were asked to judge the acceptability of 32 sentences containing "much" or "many" with 8 types of nominals. The…

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…

Between their second and fifth years, young children learn approximately 15 new words a day. For every word the child hears, he or she must choose the correct referent out of an infinite set of candidates. An important problem for developmental psychologists is to understand the principles that limit the child's hypotheses about word meanings. A…

No formal notion of markedness has been advanced for syntactic-semantic features of language. A hypothesis is presented which states that if all related features are defined as comprising sets, then it is possible to predict the occurrence of a member of a set by the absence of any other member of the set. Any lexical item subcategorized for…

Discusses the noun-plus-adjective construction in contemporary German and problems in translating this pattern into English. (AM)

Two studies addressed the relative strengths of object kind bias and syntactic knowledge in 2-year-olds' inductions of word meaning. The study looked at children's interpretations of novel proper names for familiar and unfamiliar objects. In each study, 10 children were assigned to each of 2 conditions (familiar and unfamiliar) and shown 2 cats…

A simplified pattern of noun formation is outlined that can assist the German teacher in helping students understand constituent relationships in long or obscure German nouns, providing an overview of significant patterns that covers a relatively complete noun system. First, significant patterns in nouns outside the process of formation, and…

The Seri language contains over 50 kinship terms and represents one of the most highly elaborated kinship systems described to date. This paper discusses Seri kinship terminology and centers around, but is not limited to, the set of obligatory possessed noun stems that are inflected with the following possessive prefixes":…