The structure of the grammar of Shabo, a little-known and unclassified Nilo-Saharan language of south-central Ethiopia, is described briefly. An introductory section describes the geographic area in which the language is used and reviews previous research on Shabo. Subsequent sections explain basic features of Shabo phonology (consonants,…

This work discusses the limits of conversion, or zero-derivation, as a nominalization process in the Choctaw language. It demonstrates that Choctaw relies on zero derivation for many nominalizations, but that this is a process occurring in the lexicon and therefore not a word formation rule. It also asserts that there is one reliable lexeme-level…

This paper examines the reconstruction of doublets in the Proto-Algic Indian language. These doublets suggest dialect mixing before the breakup of Proto-Algic society, with frequent elements commonly manifesting the prestige-dialect innovations. An extensive Proto-Algic vocabulary is included. Two appendixes explain new or significantly revised…

Contrastive rhetoric (CR), the study of cultural influence on written discourse has provided educators with a way to conceptualize and address anomaly in grammatically correct English texts since its birth in the mid-1960s. The development of this notion, particularly in the past 10 years, can be characterized as evolving from a narrow,…

Memory research has recently moved from looking at performance in highly artificial laboratory tasks to examination of tasks in everyday life. One consequence is the development of the concept of "working memory." For the learner, foreign language comprehension makes great demands on working memory capacity. Comprehension of a message requires…

In standard American English, the word "like" has several senses associated with it, the earliest of which dates to the 14th century. Some meanings reflect recent developments in the language and suggest that the lexical aspects of the word are changing toward a more grammatical function. Analysis of historical information and data collected in…

Folk etymology is defined as a change in word or phrase form resulting from an incorrect popular idea of its origin or meaning. Irregular phonetic-semantic shifts are produced by inter-language borrowing or by intra-language passage from one period to another. These shifts are more common in periods when there are no, or few, normative factors…

Five working papers in linguistics are presented. "Case Marking Strategies in Kope" (John Clifton) shows that there are different strategies followed by Kope for marking core as opposed to peripheral arguments, and discusses typological implications. In "Unmarked and Marked Instances of Topicalization in Hebrew" (Stephen H.…

The first contacts between linguistics and second language acquisition date from the period of contrastive analysis of languages, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When contrastive analysis failed as an explanatory model, linguists lost interest in second language research and descriptive/contrastive studies declined, resulting in a changed…

A proposal that further generalizes a rule in Government and Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981) is examined for its implications for acquisition of verb movement. Mark Baker's proposal extends the Move-alpha rule to posit that the head of any phrase may be moved to become incorporated into the head of any phrase that properly governs the phrase where…

An often-noted contrast between child and adult language is that young children produce sentences both with and without lexical subjects even if subjects are obligatory in the adult system. However, in Dutch, there is no such structural difference between the earliest stages of Dutch child grammar and the adult stage where subjects are concerned.…

Some Japanese examples of several common phonological phenomena (whispered vowels, nuclear friction, and consonant-vowel articulation) are examined. The segmental and transformational characterizations of these and related phenomena are reassessed and it is shown that by paying more careful attention to phonetic detail and abandoning conventional…

A major purpose of the research reported here is to determine whether or not children of minority backgrounds possess the ability to tell stories and verbalize in narrative form at age 3 and 4. Narratives and speech play were collected over a 9-month period in two Headstart classes in Honolulu (Hawaii). The children, most of mixed backgrounds,…

This report has two sections: an account of the meeting on autodidaxy, or self-directed learning; and a collection of studies and papers on the subject. The first part considers the following: (1) the conceptual domain of autodidaxy; (2) the constitutive elements of autodidaxy, and the plurality of definitions attached to it; (3) aspects of…

The early acquisition of the interrogative system, with data from Serbo-Croatian, is investigated. The subject is approached from the angle of adult-child interaction. A first-born pair of dizygotic twins were observed, beginning a month prior to the time when they first began to produce questions. (Author/RM)