Discusses the nature of the difference between dialectology and sociolinguistics and suggests that the findings of dialectology are relevant for use by sociolinguists. (30 references) (CK)

Uses Firbas' theory of communicative dynamism to analyze the ordering of the subject, verb, and object in Mandarin Chinese. The author demonstrates that the word order of Chinese is not so much determined by syntactic considerations as by information structuring constraints. (30 references) (Author/CK)

This study presents evidence collected from basilectal texts that the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) mental predicates "think, know, want, feel, say, see, hear" have clear lexical equivalents in Hawaii Creole English (HCE), and that these HCE predicates occur, with minor qualification, in the syntactic configurations predicted by…

Reports on a sociolinguistic survey conducted in Tokyo, Japan, that explores the social factors that relate to the use of nonstandard expressions among younger people. Sex, media exposure, and friendship networks were found to influence language standardization. (25 references) (Author/OD)