Some Japanese examples of several common phonological phenomena (whispered vowels, nuclear friction, and consonant-vowel articulation) are examined. The segmental and transformational characterizations of these and related phenomena are reassessed and it is shown that by paying more careful attention to phonetic detail and abandoning conventional…

The early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian, is investigated. The subject is approached from the angle of adult-child interaction. A first-born pair of dizygotic twins were observed, beginning a month prior to the time when they first began to produce questions. (Author/RM)

Criticizes mainstream dialectology and linguistic atlases as outdated, and suggests a method for mapping the language of the Southwest. (CK)

Analysis of adult discussions reveals a lack of fit between pedagogical grammars and actual usage. (JH)

This analysis looks at the humorous use of second-speaker repeats to initiate conversational repair. It is proposed that consideration of joking repeats forces reanalysis of the organization of conversational repair. The preference analysis theory is rejected in favor of a locally governed analysis of conversational repair in which participants…

In research on second language instruction, the researcher's knowledge of the learner's background has not always been central in data collection. However, data collection is part of a research design that should include both a description of the sample population and the role of the learner in the decision to carry out a given study.…

A discussion of pre-historic (i.e., preliterate) language looks at the processes of affixation and inflection in the context of two conflicting theories on the complexity of those languages. The traditional view holds that the grammar used by early Indo-Europeans was at least as complex and abstract as that of any modern educated and literate…

A study investigated the use of tag questions in the private conversations of Swedish men and women. Conversations took place in single-gender dyads (six with two men and six with two women) and six mixed-gender dyads. Informants were aged approximately 25 or approximately 50, of different social classes, chosen by random selection, and asked to…

A study examines various Huastec clause types that are reflexive in some sense, including ordinary reflexives, which involve co-reference. Two mutually exclusive morphosyntactic devices are used in Huastec: reflexive pronouns and verbal morphology. In this way, Huastec is like various European languages. Clauses involving reflexive pronouns and…

An autosegmental analysis of Kagate tone is presented. The focus is on tonal instability, which occurs as the result of a compensatory lengthening process. To account for facts of tonal stability, previously hypothesized, and tonal instability, it is proposed that the location of tone within the overall geometry is subject to parametric variation,…

Adult "redoing" sequences (expansions and repeats) in conversations between adult and child (age 1;6) are analyzed with a conversational analytic approach, and two ways in which redoing sequences are involved in the initiation of repair are explored. It is proposed that a redoing sequence picks up a child's utterance and displays it for some kind…

The development of linguistic politeness in 7- and 9-year-old Italian children was examined. A total of 80 subjects, 40 males and 40 females, produced requests according to different contexts which were graphically presented. Factors considered for such contexts were: sex of the speaker; sex of the addressee; status of the addressee, either peer…

The speech that upper-middle class mothers used with their young children was compared to that used by working class mothers. Mother-child interaction was recorded in four settings: mealtime, dressing, reading, and playing with toys. Also investigated were mothers' child rearing beliefs and goals. Participants included 33 upper-middle class and 30…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

The distributional and interpretive properties of the reciprocal "selo" in Korean are analyzed and compared with reciprocals in other languages, particularly Japanese and English. It is proposed that if it can be assumed that there are two homophonous "selos" in Korean, four of the five idiosyncratic properties of…