Since the colonization of the Americans, Filipinos have been using English as their second language and have been accustomed to using the language alongside local languages. The centuries of the extensive contact between American English and Filipino language raises questions pertaining language change and language identity. This paper reports the…

Notes that English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Suggests the existence of an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar to account for the constraint. (26 references) (Author/CK)

This article discusses consonant symbolism, that is, a process of modification or alternation of consonants, insofar as it relates to Yokuts. (CLK)

This article outlines the history and development of the substratum theory concerning Spanish in the Americas, the basic tenet of the theory being the role of indigenous languages in phonological changes in Spanish. (CLK)

Tests the universality hypothesis of language acquisition by asking young monolingual English and Japanese children to verify true affirmatives, false affirmatives, false negatives, and true negatives. The hypothesis was not supported in the case of Japanese-speaking children. A theory of cross-linguistic language acquisition is proposed.…

This paper examines negative incorporation in various lects of two historically related sign languages, French Sign Language and American Sign Language. Negative incorporation not only offers interesting insights into the structure of French and American Sign Language, but also into the descriptive and explanatory power of variation theory. By…

Evidence exists that, in the past, phonetic variants functioned as sociolinguistic variables, just as they do today, at least in societies with comparable stratificational patterns. This paper presents the significant details of the sociolinguistic environment within which the beginnings of the Great English Vowel Shift were embedded. An attempt…

One major view concerning what an orthography should be conforms to Pike's idea that a practical orthography should be phonemic, that is, that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between each phoneme and the symbolization of that phoneme. An alternative view, that of Chomsky and Halle, proposes that the fundamental principle of orthography…