Don L. F. Nilsen

The Use of Case Grammar in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

The use of case frames of verbs as a control for the teaching of vocabulary items has a number of distinct advantages over other concepts. The case frames associated with a particular vocabulary item or with a particular semantic class would be the same in the native and the target language (English). This would have the advantage of allowing the student to see how his language is the same as the target language. It would also enable the materials to be situationally as well as structurally controlled, and allow the students to use conceptual (as well as syntactic) clues in learning new vocabulary items.

Humorous Contemporary Jewish-American Authors: An Overview of the Criticism

It is necessary for me to start with a disclaimer. This essay is meant only to suggest some of the things that have already been done with humor in contemporary Jewish-American literature and perhaps to suggest possible new areas of research. In no way does it intend to offer new insights or to be comprehensive. I am merely trying to demonstrate the range and the diversity of scholarship in this area. This article is not meant to be read from beginning to end, but is rather meant to be read selectively, with the reader choosing those authors and those critics most relevant to current research concerns and interests.

Contrastive Semantics in Vocabulary Instruction.

One of the important influences of structural linguistics on the teaching of foreign lanugages (including English as a foreign language) is the importance of linguistic context, and the resulting development of vocabulary materials in linguistic context exclusively. But the meanings of words are determined not only by how they relate to other words in particular sentences, but also by how they contrast with other words in various types of contrasting systems (hierarchies, cycles, matrices, processes, etc.) Context is viewed not as a way of providing the meaning of a word, but as a way of restricting the meaning to a small number of the total possible senses. Therefore, the development of the paradigmatic approach (vocabulary out of context in contrastive systems) is viewed as a prerequisite to the syntagmatic approach (vocabulary in context). This article attempts to show some of the ways that a paradigmatic approach to vocabulary instruction can be set up and used in bilingual or partially bilingual situations by working with a particular semantic area-English and Spanish clothing terms.

Teaching a computer to speculate

Advanced natural language processing techniques may well lead to a major breakthrough in computer applications. Those working in artificial intelligence are seeking ways in which the computer can be made to emulate the ability of the human mind to handle language. This article illustrates the challenges of restructuring human semantic knowledge into computer-usable forms. We discuss hierarchies, Venn diagrams, chainings, cycles, matrices, maps, networks, webs, hubs, and scripts, all of which can be used in our attempts to teach the computer to handle meaning and thereby speculate.

Nine types of transformations: Is linguistics finally becoming meaningful?

Abstract Noam Chomsky has led the way for linguists in the development of models which are “elegant” in the scientific sense. Generative transformational grammar is simple, complete, internally consistent, and rule-governed. From its inception, it has had a syntactic bias, however, and Chomsky has retained this syntactic bias through Interpretive Semantics, Extended Standard Theory and into Government and Binding. However, some linguists have taken Chomskys model in a different direction, developing a semantic bias instead, a bias which Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky had never originally foreseen or intended. George Lakoff and others have extended the concept to deal with different parts of speech (e.g. “use” vs “with”). Charles Fillmore and others have applied it to converses (e.g. “buy” vs “sell”). The generative semantists have argued that verbs like “kill” can be lexically decomposed into “cause,” “become” and “dead,” and this lexical decomposition is transformational in nature. More recently, the model of componential analysis in particlar and network models in general have extended this lexical decomposition process into all semantic areas, and again the concept of the grammatical transformation has proven very valuable.