Less than a decade after the founding of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the noted American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, addressing the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1860, made his oft-quoted statement that " ...if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes. " 1 The pharma...

This study was a qualitative exploration of the effect of multiple-choice glosses and periodic second language (L2) text reconstruction on lexical acquisition. L2 readers of German engaged in a think-aloud procedure while reading a short text and retelling its content in German after each of four short sections. In each section, four unfamiliar target words (TWs) were embedded. Half of the part...

The presen t s tudy examines the s eman t i c problems involved in comput ing the meaning of the non s tandard uses of if. The cen t r a l ques t ion is whe the r or not it is necessary to in t roduce d i f f e r en t meanings of if. Austin proposed two non s tandard meanings for if. We show that these can be accoun ted for by the s t andard meaning t oge the r with shi f ts in the posi t ion o...

Certain referential expressions are used to refer to rather distinct entities in the world depending on the context of use, e.g. Dickens to refer to the author or his work or ham sandwich to refer to the food or the food orderer/eater (as in The ham sandwich wants to pay.). A systematic investigation of the processing of different types of such metonymic expressions registered discrete electrop...

ions have universal value, still requires the aid of instances, analogies and metaphors. The fewness of these abstractions saves the linguistic situation. If we employed, say, a hundred radically different types of connections (still a small number) the task of limiting the misunderstandings due to the variety in our references would have proved impossible. The fundamental connections being thu...