PubMed · 5769563
The source did not provide an abstract. Follow the original record for more information.
Explore connections, maps & timelines
A Tarski. 1969. Truth and proof.. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0669-63
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.
KEEP EXPLORING
OBJECTIVE: To describe and analyse the frequency of use of the various languages in the bibliographical references in the original articles published in Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (NTvG) during the past 65 years (1930-1995). DESIGN: Descriptive. SETTING: Hoffmann-La Roche, Basle, Switzerland. METHODS: The language of publication of 10,462 references from 700 original articles published in NTvG between 1930 and 1995 were determined (50 articles a year at intervals of five years). RESULTS: The proportion of references in English increased sharply in 1950, and has continued to increase more slowly since then (15% in 1935; 20% in 1945; 58% in 1955; 64% in 1965; 75% in 1975; 80% in 1985, and 79% in 1995). The proportion of references in Dutch decreased from 1945 to 1975, but has increased since then (20% in 1935; 29% in 1945; 15% in 1955; 16% in 1965; 12% in 1975; 15% in 1985, and 20% in 1995). The proportion of references in German decreased fairly steadily from 1945 onward (51% in 1935; 43% in 1945; 19% in 1955; 15% in 1965; 9% in 1975; 4% in 1985, and 1% in 1995). CONCLUSIONS: In 1950, English supplanted German as the undisputed main language of medicine in the Netherlands. The importance of English, increasing from 1945, has stabilised by 1975. The importance of Dutch slowly decreased from 1945, but has increased substantially since 1975.
Three questionnaire studies investigated Spanish and English readers' interpretations of sentences with complex noun phrases (NPs) such as "I really liked the preface of the book that I read yesterday." These complex NPs are ambiguous between two readings, one in which the relative clause (RC) that I read yesterday modifies the first noun, N1, preface, or the second noun, N2, book. Cuetos and Mitchell (Cognition, 1988, 30, 73-105) claimed that Spanish was biased toward having the RC modify N1, which they claimed was evidence against the cross-language universality of the late closure parsing principle. We demonstrate that the preference for N1 versus N2 modification varies greatly between different construction types within both Spanish and English while the variation between languages is relatively minor, but still of interest. The effect cannot be reduced to an effect of plausibility, but seems to reflect directly certain syntactic and semantic aspects of the constructions studied. We claim that relative clauses and other "nonprimary" phrases are not parsed following such parsing principles as late closure, but instead follow principles we advance in the form of the construal hypothesis. Thus, it is not the case that late closure is a language-specific strategy; rather, it and similar structural parsing principles are specific to only certain classes of phrases within a language.