In the contemporary standard Warsaw Polish of educated Poles, there is evidence of a system of gender-marking whereby masculine-gender nouns are being substituted for feminine professional names, working titles and surnames. The current usage is attributed to the change of status of the modern woman, or, more precisely, to her increased…

This reference grammar of Japanese is divided into thirty-one major sections: (1) notational conventions, including spelling, punctuation, accent, and juncture; (2) sentence construction: nuclear sentences and expanded sentences; (3) predicate adjuncts; (4) expansion constraints and noun subcategorization; (5) voice conversions; (6) nuclear focus…

Warns against the overuse of cohesive conjunctions in writing and recommends that teachers instruct students on contextual use of conjunctions rather than on their random use. (CRH)

Examines how young children describe reversals of action that restore objects to a prior, less-constrained, state. In both English and German, children first rely on the verb "open"; they then use their knowledge of particle pairs. Reentry into a prior state is underlined by uses of "back" and "wieder" and the…

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime…

A study of children's egocentrism in their use of person and case examined whether 7-year-olds would tend to cast themselves as subjects in sentences using the verbs "give, show, say, tell, and lend," and what role they might assign the hearer. In 85 utterances, the children (N=17), with an average age of 7.8 years, showed the expected…

The earlier composition is introduced in language instruction, the sooner students see it as a means for self-expression. However, beginning students have not learned enough grammar to produce intelligible compositions and intermediate students frequently have difficulty in synthesizing what they have learned. Thus the teacher must try to correct…

This study investigates plural noun forms in Modern Hebrew to show that the pattern of regularization differs for specific words, rather than for classes of words. Early regularization, in which the children add a plural suffix with no stem change, applies unconditionally. Subsequently, the pattern changes and while some words are still…

THIS GUIDE WAS PREPARED FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER WHO HAS HAD LITTLE OR NO TRAINING IN LINGUISTICS. OPPORTUNITIES FOR CALLING ATTENTION TO THE LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE OCCUR FREQUENTLY IN THE CLASSROOM, AND THIS GUIDE PROVIDES SUGGESTIONS FOR MAKING USE OF THEM. FOUR INITIAL CHAPTERS DISCUSS THE USAGE OF LINGUISTICS, PROVIDE A…

We outline a framework for investigating how a mathematics textbook positions the mathematics learner. We use tools and concepts from discourse analysis, a field of linguistic scholarship, to illustrate the ways in which a textbook can position people in relation to mathematics and how the text can position the mathematics learner in relation to…

In this article, I discuss a method for teaching EFL students about language bias. The method involves (A) introducing vocabulary, (B) activating knowledge, (C) giving instruction, (D) group and individual practice, and (E) reflection. I also summarize guidelines for teaching students about the use of gendered pronouns, gender-loaded nouns and…

This paper makes a usage-based contribution to the learning and teaching of German via the tools of contrastive learner corpus analysis (Granger, 1998; Granger, Hung, and Petch-Tyson, 2002; Nesselhauf, 2004). On the basis of an integrated learner and native speaker corpus of "telecollaborative" discourse (Belz, 2005), an empirically rich…

This paper explores the potential conflict classroom teachers face in their dual roles as "guardians of grammar" and as "agents of social language reform" with reference to third person singular generic pronouns in English. We investigate to what extent teachers (primary, secondary and tertiary) experience tensions between…

This paper discusses discourse markers (e.g., "and, so, anyway") and offers an overview of their characteristics and occurrence, using English for illustration. The role of discourse markers is to signal speaker comment on the current utterance. The discourse marker is not part of the sentence's propositional content. While absence of…