Presents an initial sketch of the phonology of the English spoken on Dominica, West Indies, and argues that this English is not merely an "interference phenomenon" but a true Creole. (AM)

Reports on a 1978 study of socially conditioned phonological change in the context of the decreolization process in Trinidad. (AM)

In response to his article describing a new English-language corpus designed to reflect current usage, the author agrees that extreme forms of corpus-driven language teaching are inappropriate but also that more corpus-based language instruction is needed, and that the language teaching can only benefit from better language description. (MSE)

Compares studies of English-based creoles in Atlantic with work on pidgins and creoles in Pacific to examine the core of lexicon that cannot be traced to current standard English and historical relationship between languages. The lexical base of Pacific varieties was both English and English-based creoles of the Atlantic. Grammatical and lexical…

This paper examines the differences between locative expressions in Kpelle and English, based on the dialect of one native speaker of Kpelle. It discusses the crucial role of the reference object in defining the meaning of locatives in Kpelle, in contrast to English, where the characteristics of the object to be located are less important. An…

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

A frequency count was conducted of linguistic features in the English of the Philippine mass media. Philippine English was found to have a smaller inventory of phonological units than Received Standard English. Vowel reduction does not seem to be prevalent. The collapsing of phonological distinctions is most evident in vowels and fricatives.…

Recent sociolinguistic research is used to show that the American Sign Language (ASL)-English contact situation does not result in the emergence of a pidgin as supposed. Variation along the ASL-English continuum can be accounted for by interplay of foreigner talk, judgments of proficiency, and learners' attempts to master the target language.…

Describes the processes by which distinctive varieties of English develop in areas where English functions as a second language. The distinctions between rhetorical and communicative norms for speech events in these varieties are discussed. (Author/AM)

Surveys the distribution of "a" and "an" in both oral and written English. Journal availability: see FL 512 512. (AM)

Among the 29 articles collected here are the following: (1) "On Markedness and Sociolinguistic Variation" (Amastae); (2) "On the Form of Bilingual Grammars: The Phonological Component" (Elerick); (3) "On Negation in Comparative Constructions" (Fries); (4) "Class by Value System: Implications for Bilingual…

More than 250,000 of Fiji's citizens are descendants of Indian indentured laborers of diverse origins. There are still distinct social groups based on language, religion, and place of origin. However, nearly all Fiji Indians speak one language called Fiji Hindustani. Other languages, such as Gujarati, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, are still spoken,…

The phonology of General Indian English (the region-independent variety of English that is considered the norm for India) is analyzed as a step in establishing a standard pronunciation for classroom use in India. A table is appended which presents English sound discriminations that are difficult for Indian learners with various language…

The fourth volume in this series contains nine contrastive studies in phonetics and phonology. They are: "Remarks on the Physical Manifestation of Internal Open Juncture in the English of Romanians," by Andrei Avram; "The Back Vowels of Romanian and English--A Contrastive Study," by Laurentia Dascalu; "Remarks on the English Diphthongs and…

This study was conducted to provide descriptive, comparative, quantitative, and statistical information on the syntactic characteristics of two English registers: (1) formal and informal discussion and (2) administrative correspondence. In chapters 1 and 2 the background and purpose of the study are discussed. The composition of the major spoken…