More than 250,000 of Fiji's citizens are descendants of Indian indentured laborers of diverse origins. There are still distinct social groups based on language, religion, and place of origin. However, nearly all Fiji Indians speak one language called Fiji Hindustani. Other languages, such as Gujarati, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, are still spoken,…

This paper reports on the development of the article system in an adult's interlanguage over a one-year period. It compares the results of a conventional order-of-acquisition analysis with a paradigm model based on Bickerton (1975). (Author/CFM)

Suggests the use of principal components analysis as an alternative solution to the problem of grouping speakers by sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis. An example is presented of its application to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, Australia. (Author/CB)

A study examined repair in native-nonnative (Mandarin) speaker English conversation, focusing primarily on the previously unobserved lexical element "yeah" which occurs in a speaker's ongoing or same turn at talk. Conversational analysis was used to examine the data collected and transcribed. The data was composed of roughly 120 pages of…

A salient characteristic of the morpho-lexical systems of the Salish languages is the widespread use of reduplication in both derivational and inflectional functions. Salish reduplication signals such typologically common categories as "distributive/plural,""repetitive/continuative," and "diminutive," the cross-linguistically marked but typically…

Discusses hybrid verbs as a linguistic product of the anglophone cultural influence on the Spanish spoken by Cubans in southeastern Florida. (NCR)

Based on experimental research, examines the relationship between American Sign Language and French Sign Language, and sociolinguistic variation in both sign languages. (AM)

Examines code mixing and borrowing across two generations of New York Puerto Ricans, and explores the possibility of existence of a lifecycle of language use in the community. (26 references) (Author/OD)

Examines the use and function of Chinese discourse particles in informal speech in Singaporean English, comparing the intonation and pitch movement of native varieties of English to Singaporean English. (Author/OD)

Examines the rate of phrase structure change in Yiddish, using quantitative methods to estimate the rate of change of structurally ambiguous verb clauses. Four subcases of phrase structure change are distinguished, three of which provide strong evidence for the Constant Rate Hypothesis of linguistic change. (MDM)

Examines ways in which modern varieties of English around the world differ in eight specific aspects of relative clause formation, focusing on the theoretical implications of some of the phenomena, their likely origins, and possible explanations for cases in which features are shared by apparently unassociated varieties. (Author/MSE)

This collection of working papers in syntax includes: "Null Objects in Mandarin Chinese" (Christie Block); "Toward a Linearization-Based Approach to Word Order Variation in Japanese" (Mike Calcagno); "A Lexical Approach to Inalienable Possession Constructions in Korean" (Chung, Chan); "Chinese NP Structure"…

A non-structural model is proposed for quantifying and analyzing the dynamics of language attrition, particularly among immigrants in a second language environment, based on examination of disfluencies (hesitations, errors, and repairs). The first chapter discusses limitations of the conventional synchronic textual approach to analyzing language…

Six papers on Irish English are presented. "The Study of Hiberno-English" (Jeffrey L. Kallen) surveys some aspects of research on the language and offers a historical context for the subsequent papers. "A Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English in Its Context" (T. M. Tilling) reports on the early stages of an island-wide survey…

A study was undertaken to demonstrate that expository prose written in Indian English exhibits certain characteristics determined by the sociocultural conventions of writing in the Indian tradition. These features of Indian English texts are often judged to be inappropriate by native speakers of North American and British English, and mistakenly…