In spoken and written situations which focused the teachers' attentions on information rather than on their language, samples of 100 English teachers' actual language were obtained with respect to five debatable usages: "everybody...their,""reason...is because,""who" as an object pronoun, "will/would" with the first person subject to express…

Analyzes five basal readers and 10 adolescent novels to determine the occurrence of three types of language styles or registers: formal, informal, and technical/special. Concludes that the basal readers contained examples of all three types of registers while the novels contained relatively few examples of technical/special language. (FL)

This article compares three models of morphological storage and processing: (1) the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and others; (2) the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg, and others; and (3) the network model of Bybee and Langacker. Type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining…

Examines the number of relative clauses and percentages of subordinate clauses in two sets of research reports from "Physical Review." Finds a slight decrease in percentages of relative clauses from the first set (1893-1901) to the second (1980). Finds striking differences in patterns of what relative clauses modify. Suggests a stylistic…

Describes and quantifies aspects of the comparative clauses conjoined with correlatives "than" and "as." The data are compared to show patterns of distribution, their spread across different genres, and the similarity or otherwise of their use in Britain and Australia. Findings show that the scalar comparative clause does not…

Uses content analysis to compare two community newspapers for indices of elaboration identified through various theoretical sources. Traces the relationship of economic development and technological growth to use of elaborative elements in text describing science and technology. Concludes there were strong correlations for breadth and depth in the…

Since language is socially mediated and context dependent, it would be expected that learners' use of language learning strategies may vary with the environment. Using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1990), this study examines the language learning behaviors and thought processes of two geographically and…

Controversial claims made about characteristics of "women's speech" are examined in a comparison of certain aspects of the language used by 17 ten-year-olds (9 boys and 8 girls) and 20 adults (10 men and 10 women, mean age 20.0 years), all native speakers of English. The subjects were asked to pretend to speak on the telephone to a person of…

Noting that one way to tap into organizational life involves examining the symbolic discourse occurring in the context, a study examined stories and metaphors, forms of symbolic discourse, in two Christian denominations in Southern Appalachia. Transcriptions from audiotapes of sermons and lay talks (e.g., Sunday School lessons) from Church of God…

Contending that an examination of the commentary and text of the media can reveal the composition, assumptions, and goals of political opposition movements, this paper analyzes the role of the press and its language of protest in Poland's current political context. The first section of the paper examines the responses of both the official and the…

To provide an authority on usage, this book presents an analysis of the treatment of American English as it appears in a number of dictionaries and usage guides. The first chapter presents brief sketches of the usage guides and studies that provided the basis for this compilation and discusses the organization of the book. After a resume of the…

A study was conducted to delineate the qualitative differences in the language abilities of two disadvantaged groups and one advantaged group of kindergarten and first grade children who were tested on the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. (As part of a larger study, the present report deals only with a part of the pretest phase.)…

Among the Mexican American Dialects activity's concerns is the linguistic phenomena characterizing what has been termed Local Hispanicized English (LHE) and whether or not LHE has become an institutionalized dialect of American English. In order to answer whether LHE has characteristics distinguishing it from other Hispanicized forms of English…

Demonstrates the operation of the universal principles of lexical simplification, through an examination of its use in translation; second language learning and teaching, and simplified reading texts. (Author/AM)

A series of referential description tasks performed by normal and educationally subnormal children of equivalent mental age is reported, with the subnormal subjects consistently performing much worse than much younger children of normal intelligence. Aspects of performance and suggestions for improving communication skills are discussed. (MF)