Comparative research indicates that almost without exception, late eighteenth century non-standard English pronunciation was very close to what is called Broad Australian. Present Australian English is closely akin to the blended, popular colloquial London English, spoken by the largest group of Australia's first settlers. This pronunciation…

Discusses nominal-pronominal reduplication (NPR) in the language of children ages seven and nine in four situations. Younger children produced more NPR; all children produced little NPR talking to their peers and increasing amounts talking to adults. Examples are given and analyzed. (EJS)

Describes the characteristics of language conflict and examines the areas of emphasis in the literature, including multilingualism and linguistic identity, glottophagia and minority/majority relations, the danger of reliance on language censuses, conflict resolution/avoidance, and the importance of ecolinguistics in conflict description and for…

CORDON is a computerized system for tracing and documenting changes in the use and frequency of word forms within textual language corpora. In its new form currently under development, CORDON will address the emergence of neologisms, both new words and new terminology within special areas (generally new uses of existing words). The system detects…

A study of verb agreement and clause structure in Karaja, a Brazilian indigenous language of Macro-Je stock, discusses the subject and object agreement systems with relation to the Feature Specification Constraint. Implementation of the SOV order in Karaja is then analyzed and evidence is presented for the existence of a single functional phrase…

Investigates the inconsistencies of personal pronoun production both in production and between production and comprehension in a pronoun-reversing child. (EKN)

Reports on two studies exploring the contrast effects in judgments of messages exhibiting high or low lexical and syntactic diversity. Suggests that listeners are sensitive to variations in lexical diversity but not syntactic diversity. (RL)

Refutes the theory that indirect requests are ambiguous. Arguments for it are examined and an attempt is made to expose the weaknesses in the kinds of tests generally used to detect "illocutionary" ambiguity. An alternative analysis in the framework of semantics and the pragmatics of directive speech acts is suggested. (AMH)

A study investigated differences in sentence interpretation, with case marking and lexical-semantic cues systematically manipulated, of 20 native English-speaking learners of Japanese (JFLs) (10 beginners, 10 intermediate) and 10 native Japanese-speaking learners of English. Results show: greater animacy effect with the verb "see" than "eat";…

English as an international language (EIL) has spread through development of autonomous registers that guarantee specialist communication within global expert communities. Most people learn English for this, not for social conversation with native speakers. Therefore, EIL is English for special purposes. Rather than emphasize "authentic" usage,…

Presents the results of an investigation into the acquisition of syllable structure and stress by a preschool Dutch child. Shows how the structure of the child's output approaches the adult models in stages and discusses a phenomenon called "mutation," in which all continuants are consistently replaced with "n-" in onsets. (51…

Uses eight languages in five distinct linguistic areas to examine two hypotheses regarding text generation and analysis and to illustrate their reciprocity relative to narrative discourse. Demonstrates how these hypotheses yield salience schemes and constituent analysis which mutually corroborate and correct each other. (KEH)

Provides a brief account and explanation of the phenomenon of language use among the Baba community, which uses Hokkien, Malay, and English in the process of code selection and code mixing/switching. Data are drawn from recordings of conversation of the Babas and Nyonyas. (Author/OD)

The quantification of communication network integration provides valuable information for the study of language change in very small rural communities such as Grossdorf, Austria. The approach is particularly relevant when study of aggregate group behavior has failed to yield results due to small sample size or group internal inconsistency. (26…

An analysis of Brazilian learners' errors in English word stress revealed a difficulty hierarchy of stress pattern rules and six stress prediction strategies: (1) cognate stress patterns; (2) predominant stress patterns of English; (3) initial vowels and consonants; (4) verbs with a tense vowel in the final syllable; (5) tertiary stress; and (6)…