This thesis examines how silence was understood by speakers of biblical Hebrew. Using the biblical books, Ben Sira, Dead Sea Scrolls, and inscriptions, it evaluates how seven lexemes referring to silence were used. Each reference was examined for clues to meaning, using syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, parallels, glosses, antonyms, and causal relations. The early versions (Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Syriac) were consulted to see if they might shed further light on ancient understandings of these words. Semitic languages were also surveyed for potential cognates that might reveal diachronic semantic development. The chosen lexemes divided into two related domains: restraint (of sound, of action) and cessation (of sound, of motion, of life). Part 1 covers words indicating restraint. Part 2 covers words indicating cessation. Part 3 briefly introduces peripheral words. The conclusion offers some observations about the field as a whole, describing how the lexemes overlap and differ. Tables and diagrams are offered to represent the richness and versatility of this field graphically.

Recent progress in psycholinguistic research on written Chinese allows us to develop a new approach to investigate the Chinese reading acquisition process. We hypothesized that Chinese children, much like children learning an alphabetic script, do not simply learn written words by rote. As they are taught words to be learned by rote, they develop an implicit understanding of the formal and functional characteristics of written Chinese. The formal characteristics refer to the graphic structure and the positioning of the stroke-patterns, and the functional characteristics refer to the semantic and phonological information conveyed in the stroke-patterns. The studies reported were designed to investigate the nature of children's learning of written Chinese. In two series of studies, a total of 236 children from Hong Kong, aged four to nine, created and decoded novel Chinese compound words. Results showed that young Chinese children attended to both the formal and functional constraints in reading and writing tasks. In the judging task, 4-year-olds were able to identify the type of orthographic elements - the stroke-patterns, but they could not place them in legitimate positions. The 6-years-olds were able to refer both to the position and the correct type of orthographic elements in differentiating pseudowords from nonwords. In the writing and reading tasks, four and five-year-olds were unable to utilize the semantic radicals to represent meaning, nor could they use the phonological components for pronunciation; six-year-olds could use the semantic radicals to represent meaning and only nine-year-olds could both use semantic radicals correctly and systematically referred to the phonological components for pronunciation. A significant age difference was found in all the experiments. The studies provide strong evidence that learning compound words in Chinese is not a simple matter of memorizing but involves the understanding of formal and functional constraints in the script. A possible application of these findings lies in the new direction offered for reading instruction where the non-generative, rote view of learning to read and write in Chinese can be safely abandoned.

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A generalized inclusion (g.i.) frame consists of a set of points (or "worlds") W and an assignment of a binary relation Rw on W to each point w in W. generalized inclusion frames whose Rw are partial orders are called comparison frames. Conditional logics of various comparative notions, for example, Lewis's V-logic of comparative possibility and utilitarian accounts of conditional obligation, model the dyadic modal operator > on comparison frames according to (what amounts to) the following truth condition: oc>13"holds at w" if every point in the truth set of a bears Rw to some point where holds. In this essay I provide a relational frame theory which embraces both accessibility semantics and g.i. semantics as special cases. This goal is achieved via a philosophically significant generalization of universal strict implication which does not assume accessibility as a primitive. Within this very general setting, I provide the first axiomatization of the dyadic modal logic corresponding to the class of all g.i. frames. Various correspondences between dyadic logics and first order definable subclasses of the class of g.i. frames are established. Finally, some general model constructions are developed which allow uniform completeness proofs for important sublogics of Lewis' V. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

The primary object of inquiry is the semantics of the progressive and perfect constructions in English, and their interaction with the deictic category of tense. The domain of inquiry is text. The major concern is the argument that a full description of these constructions' development involves consideration of both functional (semantic- pragmatic) and formal (morphosyntactic) change. The bases of the framework constructed for analysis are Lyons' (1977; 1982) theory of locutionary subjectivism, and Traugott's (1982) model of semantic- pragmatic shifts in the grarrmaticalization process. Thus the description depends on the r ole of text in characterizing and shaping the meaning and use of auxiliary elements. Accordingly, I use a range of text-types for illustrative purposes. It is important to emphasize their exemplary function - they do not constitute a statistically defined or determined corpus. The main theme of this dissertation is the emergence of what I call the 'subjectivity' of these constructions in the context of their realization as grarrmatical markers of the English auxiliary. The study is divided into three parts. The first (chapters 1, 2, and 3) is a synchronic characterization of tense semantics focussing on subjectivity and text; and against this background, the semantics of the progressive and the perfect. The second part (chapters 4, 5, 6) is a detailed historical account of the perfect and the progressive in the framework of grarrmaticalization. A central concern of this section is the exploration of the semantic-pragmatic shifts forming part of the grarnnaticalization process. The last part, chapter 7, is an attempt to show the early instantiation of expressive meanings through the subjective function of tense, the progressive and perfect in experiential text- types, represented by the personal letter . The study is therefore organized cyclically, its major themes being the grarrunaticalization and semantic- pragmatic development of the English auxiliary, and their elucidation through text.

In attempting to illustrate between-language semantic transfer French-English bilinguals were trained under a conditioning paradigm basically analogous to that used in unilingual semantic generalization studies. The major difference lay in the testing phase. That is, testing for conditioned responses (CRs) to the translations of the stimuli replaced testing for CRs to synonyms of the stimuli. Eight two-syllable nouns in both French and English were presented, with half the stimuli in each of the two languages paired with shock. Following the conditioning procedure shock was withheld and the translation of each of the stimuli was presented. Measures of Galvanic Skin Responses (GSRs) and digital and cephalic vasomotor activity were recorded during both training and testing. The results clearly indicated greater occurrence of GSRs to the translation of the words paired with shock than to the translation of the neutral words. There was no significant difference in the occurrence of digital vasomotor activity; however, cephalic readings suggested significant constriction to the translation of the stimuli which had been paired with shock. The occurrence of CRs to the translation of verbal stimuli suggests a form of mediated transfer from one language to another. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Submitted in fulfillment for the Degree Master of Arts in the Department of African Languages at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 1990. / In any language, words are uttered systematically according to certain rules. Each language has therefore its own system. Language may be defined as "a system of utterances governed by a set of.rules". In a language there are partial systems such as Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, etc. Wnen these partial systems are put together they form a unique system of a particular language. Phonetics is the study of a single speech sound. A word is made up of a number of phonetic units.

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