The volume represents in microcosm the sort of faculty-trainee-student interaction that is a priority at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) at the University of North Dakota. Seven studies by faculty and students of SIL include the following: "Lexical Variation in Mexican Sign Language" (J. Albert Bickford); "Reflexives in…

A study of the functions and structure of referential third- person pronominal chains in spontaneous English conversation as compared to those in written English is discussed. The study found the frequencies of these pronouns and of their chains to be generally much higher in the spoken corpus than in the written corpus. In the spoken corpus,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the rhetoric of confrontation in Northern Ireland; (2) rhetorical arguments in public health regulations; (3) epideictic discourse in the founding of the…

A study focused on the nature and effect of constraints on the hypotheses that learners make about the meanings of words. Two experiments were conducted at a large midwestern university: the first, involving 68 undergraduate students divided randomly into two groups, tested taxonomic and durative constraints on nouns, and time of day and cessation…

Consisting of two separate papers, "Representational Issues in Systemic Functional Grammar," by Christian Matthiessen and "Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar," by Robert Kasper, this document deals with systemic aspects of natural language processing and linguistic theory and with computational applications of…

This book contains essays which focus on the systems of communication that operate within and between various social segments of Afro-American communities in the United States. The essays are presented under the following headings: (1) "Getting Into It: Black Talk, Black Life and the Academic," (2) "'Talking My Talk': Black Talk Varieties and…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…

Criticism has been directed at a growing body of literature broadly referred to as ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, folk science, ethnographic semantics, and cognitive anthropology. Criticisms concern methodological and analytic aspects of ethnoscientific procedure, and the directions of ethnosemantic research from a theoretical point of view. The…

The intent of this study was to determine the extent to which preschool children's speech to self, their private speech, was differentiated from their social speech. Ten randomly chosen preschool children, six boys and four girls with a median age of 56 months, were observed in conditions supportive of oral communication (free play), and in…

A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic…

Contrastive analysis is suggested as a tool in language teaching for such areas as: (1) deciding how much to focus on different aspects of the target language; (2) making generalizations about its structure; and (3) explaining texts or constructions which might otherwise be incomprehensible. The claim is made that such procedures need to be based…

The relationship between first-grade reading achievement and selected experimental language measures was investigated. The measures selected for study were (1) number of T-units (communication units) spoken in an experimental situation, (2) mean length of T-unit, (3) ratio of subordinate clause length to T-unit length, (4) ratio of…

Approximately 60 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were administered a language test constructed to determine theirlanguage usage levels and limitations. Half of the children were classified as Head Start and half as middle class. The language test involved the presentation of strings of three to seven phonemes organized on five levels of…

Based on transcribed conversations with black children in kindergarten and the intermediate grades, a study was devised to determine whether black urban children from lower socioeconomic areas speak a systematic, consistent form of nonstandard English, and if so, to provide a syntactical analysis of the dialect of nonstandard speakers. Speech…

This study explores the effect of information focus on the size of the unit decoded by a reader. Sixty students chosen at random from average reading groups in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade levels were studied. Each subject read orally 36 thematic sentence frames presented in random order. Each frame contained a point at which the visual display…