The nature and use of names are the focus of a resarch report published in a Canadian journal. The article presents the results of a study of college and university sports teams' nicknames, including major categories of names (human, animal world, mythical, etc.), and frequency of names. The report concludes with a discussion of the social…

This issue contains two feature items. The "SLANT Special Report on Current Research with Indochinese Refugees in the U.S." describes 14 research projects in progress. The article "Southwestern Applied Linguistics" by John W. Oller, Jr. and others presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in the southwestern United…

This pamphlet is the ninth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet describes a project that was undertaken to discover…

Three colloquium papers are presented on two fields of linguistics, dialogism (the study of dialogue content) and polyphony (the representation of different sounds by the same letter or symbol). The first paper, by J. Moeschler, examines dialogism, dialogue, and polyphony from the perspective of the pragmatics of the utterance and the pragmatics…

A project is described that was undertaken to investigate: (1) how long a cloze test has to be to achieve optimum reliability without wasting anyone's time; and (2) how cloze tests should be scored in order to obtain maximum reliability. The literature recommended 50 deletions in order to provide for an adequate sample of examinee's abilities; it…

Five studies of aboriginal language use in Australia's Northern Territory include: (1) "Yanyuwa--A Dying Language" (Jean F. Kirton), which outlines the factors contributing to the demise of the use of Yanyuwa since 1963 and the trend toward use of Kriol; (2) "Kriol in the Barkly Tableland" (Phillip L. Graber), presenting…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) stop/fricative variation; (2) the acquisition of relational comparatives; (3) teachers' turn taking sanctions in primary school lessons; (4) hearing as an age…

This edition of a newsletter for second language researchers and teachers features an article by Lars Henric Ekstrand, "Report on Organization and Research in Programs of Bilingual and Bicultural Adaptation in Sweden." Programs of instruction in Swedish for immigrant adults and children, including teacher training policies, are…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Some Problems of YES-NO Answers" (Aleksander Szwedek); "Danish versus Russian. A Short Analysis of the Verb" (Christian Hougaard); "Polish SIE Constructions and Their English Counterparts" (Wojciech Kubinski); "More on the Time Reference and the Analysis of Tense"…

Five papers on bilingualism are presented. "Giving Transfer a Boost--Describing Transfer Variation in Learners' Interlanguage Performance" by Claus Faerch suggests, outlines, and illustrates a heuristic principle for describing the result of positive transfer from one language to another, based on the assumption that learners maximize…

This pamphlet is the fifth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet reports on a case study involving a twelfth grade…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Question of Imperatives" (Tom Wachtel); "Contrastive Sociolinguistics--Some Methodological Considerations" (Karol Janicki); "How to Describe Phonological Variation" (Thomas Herok, Livia Tonelli); "Towards a Contrastive Pragmalinguistics" (Philip Riley); "The Perception…

A study of verb agreement and clause structure in Karaja, a Brazilian indigenous language of Macro-Je stock, discusses the subject and object agreement systems with relation to the Feature Specification Constraint. Implementation of the SOV order in Karaja is then analyzed and evidence is presented for the existence of a single functional phrase…

The purpose of this study was to describe the pronunication of American college students learning French. To gather the data a set of 21 sounds, all theoretically in contrast with English sounds, was chosen. These were elicited in a series of sessions during the subjects' first semester of French. The subjects recorded their pronunciation on…

These papers deal with a variety of topics bearing on modality in a variety of languages and language families. While all languages have ways of expressing modality, that is, such notions as possibility, necessity, and contingency, this phenomenon has been the object of little systematic linguistic analysis. These papers are presented with the…