TO DISPEL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH TEACHERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED BY THE LINGUIST. THE LINGUIST SEES LANGUAGE AS "A SYSTEM OF PATTERNED VOCAL BEHAVIOR BY MEANS OF WHICH MEN COOPERATE IN SOCIETY." BY USING RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC METHODS, HE STUDIES REPRESENTATIVE AND AUTHENTIC…

An interactionist-discovery theory of child phonology is proposed based on the following tenets: children invent their own phonological rules, and phonetic mastery is not automatically or generally in step with learning about phonemic contrasts. When a child learns the sound pattern of a language, there is constant interaction between the…

Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

An extreme view of language acquisition sees base structures as innate, and acquisition of the grammar of a particular language as a process of learning the transformation rules needed to get from base structures to surface structures of adult native speakers. Base structures are understood to most resemble simple-active-affirmative-declarative…

A review of the literature on Black English was made to determine what information is available and to assess the credibility of the information. The review covered the years from 1865 through the first half of 1975. More than 75 documents were identified as potentially informative in the area of investigation. The linguistic features of Black…

The contents of this book are organized in three main sections: Part 1, "Beginnings," includes three papers: "Some sociological determinants of perception,""A public language: some sociological implications of a linguistic form," and "Language and social class." Part 2, "Developments," includes four papers: "A review of 'The Lore and Language of…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of initial consonants, especially /s/, on the pluralization of English nouns by both native English- and native Spanish-speaking first grade pupils. A test instrument consisting of nonsense syllable trigrams was constructed based on linguistic descriptions of English noun pluralization.…

Transcriptions of recorded conversations of nine-year-old French children are analyzed and presented in this comparative word count. The actual count of the 55,588 word corpus is arranged alphabetically and contrasted with selected, identical words found in the Francais Fondamental word list. Proper nouns are listed separately at the end of the…

This volume presents five languages of India-Nepal from four different language families: Halbi and Kupia (India) of the Indo-Aryan family, Parengi-Gorum (India) of the Munda family, Dhangar-Kudux (Nepal) of the Dravidian family, and Tamang (Nepal) of the Tibeto-Burman family. Papers are entitled "Semanitc Relations between Whole Propositions…

This paper deals with problems concerning the nature of the input to a phonetic processor. Several assumptions provide the basis for consideration of the problem. There is a phonological level of processing which reflects the sound structure of the language; the rules associated with it are not affected by variables associated either with the…

This discussion considers the process of subject raising, which takes the constituent subject out of the complement clause and makes it a constituent of the matrix clause and the occurrence of this process in Japanese and in other subject-object-verb (SOV) languages. The first part of the paper demonstrates why subject raising is not a common…

In this study, the author seeks to demonstrate that Swedish is unique in its avoidance of the pronouns of address, extreme in its use of impersonal questions and circumscriptions, and that such language usage is directly related to the perceived relationship of social status, as explicitly and implicitly expressed by informants. The author also…

Examines the role of "routines" and grammatical patterns in first and second language acquisition by children and adults, specifically with regard to syntactic structures. (Author/AM)

A review of research leads to the proposal that infants' perception of "fragile" contrasts is lost due to their lack of exposure to particular sounds. Perception of "robust" contrasts is lost around the onset of formal language training due to children's lack of experience with phonologically irrelevant sounds. (Author/CB)

Argues that the adequacy of pidgins and creoles as expressive instruments requires systematic empirical research. This research would be based on two sound approaches: a macro-survey of language resources and a micro-analysis of language samples. (CB)