The structure of associations in language and thought \ James Deese
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1.The Idea of Association2.The Empirical Study of Associative Organization3.The Concept of Associative Meaning4.The Psychological Structure of Meaning5.Associative Structure and Grammatical Structure6.The Analysis of a Form Class-Adjectives7.Nouns and Some General Properties of Associative Structures8.The New Laws of Association Appendix: An Associative Dictionary
All existing theories of associations are concerned with the problem of how one thing comes to follow another in the stream of thought or language. Most existing theories are cast in the form of stimulus and response and stem from the basic assumption that a particular stimulus-response sequence occurs in the thought or language because it has occurred that way before. This study presents a new theory of association, concentrating on the structural relations between distributions of associations to particular words in a language, and provides the historical and critical background for that theory in the psychology of associations.The techniques of factor analysis and other methods of structural analysis are brought to bear in an effort to discover the basic structural types of association. Two basic types are dis covered in English, and evidence is presented to show that the effects of these types are to be found not only in associative data but in ordinary English discourse and in judgments about language.It has implications for psychological studies of language-particularly meaning For the teaching of aspects of language, and for theories of human cognitive development.