A study of Chinese logograph recognition investigated: (1) whether word-length effect is generalizable to Chinese readers in recognizing context-free logographic characters; (2) whether readers from mainland China would outperform readers from Taiwan when each group read its own familiar logograph version; (3) whether both groups would perform…

In Quebec French, unlike standard French, sentence negation "pas" ("not") can occur in the same clause as a negative quantifier like "personne" ("nobody"), for instance. This paper proposes that "pas" in these contexts marks negative association in the same way that "ne" does in standard…

A study of the pronunciation of an adult male Swahili speaker, a native and long-term resident of Mombasa Old Town, supplemented with notes on other adult speakers, suggests a new account of glides and phonological change in this variation of the language. The asymmetrical distribution of the two glide types (palatal and labiovelar) is analyzed…

A study of the language use of 45 transitional Spanish-English bilinguals focused on subject pronoun usage patterns evolving when the bilingual has acquired both a prodrop (Spanish) and a non-prodrop (English) language and frequently switches between them. Subjects were of Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican background, and had not attained the…

A study of dialectal variation in Mexican Sign Language (MSL), the primary language for a large segment of Mexico's deaf community, is presented. Signs used by nine different sources representing various locations, ages, and social groups are compared. The first section reviews a number of previous informal assessments of dialectal variation in…

Intended for students in regular and advanced composition classes, each of the four controlled composition exercises presented in this paper aims at teaching writing style through carefully constructed short passages that concentrate on an isolated problem in style such as parallel structure, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses, and…

The occurrence of Black English Venacular (BEV) dialect features in the writing of 42 inner-city college students was studied using such sociolinguistic methods as variable rule analysis, computer programs, and implicational scales. A comparison of the patterns found in the subjects' writing with those found in spoken BEV revealed that sometimes,…

This computer program, a mechanization of the handsorted techniques which geographical dialectology has been using, increases the number of hypotheses that can be explored and the various correlations that can be made. It can draw several of the kinds of maps that dialectologists have used in direct atlases. The hardware, software, and program…

In this paper various sexist practices in the English language are discussed and feminist criticism of these practices is given. This criticism is analyzed in terms of the kinds of linguistic changes proposed and the extent to which these changes have taken hold, assessing the prospects for success of each type of change. Three particular…

This paper examines language in a factory setting and focuses on: (1) language workers use to express attitudes toward work areas, jobs and workers associated with them (Hymes, 1974); (2) behavior workers exhibit in relation to their socially defined status (Fishman 1970; Tyler 1971); and (3) speech forms workers use for particular situations and…

Analysis of the distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels within word boundaries in Italian demonstrates: the role of phonological constraints on the distribution of non-syllabic words; the syllabification possibilities within each type of sequence by setting up a structural model; and the phonemic occurrences in vowel sequences collected…

Traces the history of the presence of black people's languages in Great Britain and also provides a contemporary perspective on current needs to define and articulate these language needs and to contribute toward the theory and development of language teaching, teacher training, and production of teaching material. (Author/CB)

This dictionary is designed to provide an inventory of English usage in the Caribbean environment and lifestyle as known and spoken in each territory but not recorded in the standard British and American desk dictionaries. It cross-references different names for the same item throughout the anglophone Caribbean, identifies different items called…

This study investigated the strategies used by westerners, particularly American, Canadians, and Britons, to assimilate linguistically with the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria. The report begins with a brief chronicling of the history of colonialism and English usage in Nigeria. The study is then described. Based on observation of…

A study investigated the role of audience awareness in translation of lexical items, specifically as it may affect translation from English to Chinese. The audiences, or readership, in this case is defined as readers from three different regions in which Chinese is used predominantly: Hong Kong; mainland China; and Taiwan. The varieties of Chinese…