A study investigated the use of lexical certainty modifiers, which have a mitigating or emphasizing function (e.g., "I suppose,""sort of,""obviously"). Although certainty modifiers add little to the referential information of messages, they can be very important interpersonally, particularly in terms of politeness.…

Departing from the prescriptive approach to teaching advanced Spanish composition and stylistics, this manual is based on the analysis of constructions and style in contemporary Spanish literature--particularly the drama. The 20 sections emphasize linguistic difficulties of a conceptual nature rather than factual information. Topics include: (1)…

The purposes of this grammar of Aklanon are to: (1) provide teachers with a sourcebook on their dialect, so that they can understand the formalities of Aklanon; (2) provide foreign learners of the dialect, particularly Peace Corps volunteers or missionaries, with a reference grammar; and (3) provide linguists with a treatment of an unresearched…

A new fundamental tool of analysis, the morphophone, is presented in this monograph, and some implications of this discovery for the problems involved in the teaching of literacy are considered. The relation of written to spoken English is explored first, for experience has shown that the basic problem in becoming literate is gaining the ability…

This reference guide presents detailed information about current English usage with emphasis on both formal and informal written language. The practical needs of advanced learners of English as a second language are considered and there is heavy concentration on grammatical usages that continue to trouble foreign students: articles, verb forms,…

Examines the use of cohesive conjunctions by student writers in Hong Kong to ascertain how it differs from native speaker use, to gauge the extent to which teaching, textbooks and transfer are influential, and to analyze the extent of misuse and unnecessary use. The article makes suggestions for teaching implications and further research. (18…

Current cross-sectional morpheme accuracy methodology whittles away the data until what remains in the final analysis is less interesting than what has been discarded. These methods of analysis obscure and eliminate variation in individual production of the morphemes under study and fail to reveal true systematicity in the data. Using data on…

The current study investigated whether the change toward more gender-inclusive English that is taking place in Inner Circle countries is also gaining acceptance for English usage in an Outer Circle country: Singapore. Data for the study came principally from a questionnaire completed by students at a Singapore junior college and from writing…

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of subject pronouns in third language (L3) production. Participants were 90 Basque-Spanish bilingual students, learning English as a third language in a formal setting in the Basque Country. All the participants, who had received the same amount of exposure to English, were divided into three groups…

This grammar of Pashto was designed to accompany a set of beginning- and intermediate-level instructional materials for teaching the Pashto language to English speakers, but can be used separately as a reference by readers who are not learning the language. Introductory sections in English and Pashto describe the content and organization. The…

This is an introductory text for the Swazi language, siSwati. Spoken by nearly a half million people in Swaziland, siSwati is one of the Nguni languages of the southeastern branch of the Bantu languages. Each of the 25 lessons in this text covers one or more basic grammatical structures. The first five lessons present the sound system in detail,…

A collection of 17 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Present Trends in Contrastive Linguistics,""Contrastive Linguistics in Bulgaria,""Communicative Competence in Foreign Language Teaching: A Project Report,""From Traditional…

The selection of papers from the 6th Annual International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning (Urbana, Illinois, April 1992) include: "Discourse Markers Across Language" (Bruce Fraser); "Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon" (Yael Ziv); "Situated Discourse: The Sociocultural Context of…

Essays on varieties of English in the United States include: "Research Trends in the Study of American English" (Edgar W. Schneider); "Piney Woods Southern" (Lee Pederson); "Foundations of American English" (William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.); "The Comparability of Linguistic Atlas Records: The Case of LANCS an…