Discusses the applicability of the notion of structured variability in language to contrastive analysis. (Author/AM)

Learned academies deplore the deterioration of Castillian Spanish due to foreign contamination. They ignore the real source of the problem within Spain itself where everyone speaks the language badly except those in the remote towns and a few intellectuals. A ray of hope comes from the Americans. (Text is in Spanish.) (AMH)

Posits two hypotheses arising from the great immigration to Sweden and the immigrants' use and learning of Swedish: (1) Swedish as used by immigrant children may show certain features, related to a creolization process; and (2) the Swedish language may in future show signs of influence from the varieties used by persons with immigrant background.…

Reviews research studies that raise serious questions about phonological neutralization, that is, the merger of a contrast in certain contexts. Some findings cast doubt on the very existence of neutralization and the correctness of the theoretical principles that make assumptions based on neutralization. Reanalyzes neutralization in light of these…

A study of the acquisition of interrogative forms in children of high socioeconomic status reveals that utterances belong more to the colloquial than to the standard range. It is concluded that disadvantaged children would show similar usage, leading to the suggestion that teachers teach language as they use it. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

This article explores the notion that the assumptions on which the process of linguistic analysis is based relate to linguistic universals. The kinds of universals that underlie the process and their role in it are examined. (CLK)

Discusses the problem of discrepancies between the pedagogical model of the French language traditionally used in language instruction, and the model of so-called "common French." (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Notes that few phonemes exhibit greater variance in the membership of phonemes that make up an equivalency class than the phoneme represented by /r/. Points out that the relationship between the auditory features of the speech signal and phonetic classification provides insight into a language's encoding and decoding system. (23 references)…

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…

Although Spanish mood has been taught through a framework of categorical rules, recently attempts have been made to clarify the exact nature of certain rules and to better understand the patterns of rule variability that exist outside the classroom. This article examines the intersection of mood with notions such as habituality, general truths,…

Two surveys of Parisian French mid-vowel articulation and preference, performed in 1986 and 1988, are reviewed and compared. Informants were 21 male teacher trainees (study 1) and 60 male local transportation workers, aged 20 to 60 (study 2). Conclusions are drawn concerning mid-vowel opposition, anteriorization, and vowel harmony. Emphasis is…

It is proposed that the study of the history of the French language would be enhanced by combining the methodology of linguistics with that of history proper, examining institutional, cultural, and social history as part of the evolution of a language. Distinctions between variation, innovation, shift, and change are examined. (Author/MSE)

Language choice (LC) for literacy must consider mother tongue, language of first sight, local lingua francas, and any readily accessible world language. Common but false assumptions regarding LC are noted: multilingualism as a barrier to development, the necessity of a world language, and the permanance of language patterns. (Contains four…

Describes a morphosyntactic feature of the Xining dialect that is unique among all Chinese dialects: that is, the use of a preposition to express ablative nominal relationships. (Author/VWL)

A study identified second-person singular pronoun usage among Salvadoran speakers living in Houston, Texas, to see what changes, if any, have been caused by contact with other Spanish speakers with different speech patterns. Although the results confirm some linguistic behavior observed by others, some unexpected facts and diverging trends were…