Four word-learning studies exposed 2-year olds to novel verbs and nouns. Found that knowledge of what action or object was impending was not necessary for learning the words; children learned a novel verb for an intentional but not an accidental action; and children learned a novel noun for an object being sought, but not ones rejected while…

This article discusses content schemata, formal schemata, and the newly-hypothesized abstract discourse schemata, asserting that empirical studies confirm that abstract schemata are more powerful owing to their greater generality than formal schemata, which in turn are superior to content schemata. (118 references) (MDM)

Presents a description of auxiliary and aspectual marker verbs in African American English. Discussion focuses on patterns of the auxiliary system as a whole, highlights the generalization that speakers of the dialect make when they use the system, describes how the language system is rule-governed, and presents some meaning differences between…

This article compares children's productions of wh-questions such as "who?" or "what?". Data were gathered using the technique of elicited production. (26 references) (JL)

An empirical study of word order correlations, based on a sample of 625 languages, determined exactly what pairs of elements correlate in order with the verb and object. An alternative to the Head-Dependent Theory is presented: the Branching Direction Theory, based on consistent ordering of phrasal and nonphrasal elements. (85 references)…

Relative importance of appearance and potential function in children's object naming was examined. First, 16 children, taught novel names for unfamiliar objects, had to decide whether these applied to items that resembled the training objects in appearance or potential function. Then the name training procedure was revised so that equal emphasis…

Exploratory ideas about discourse analysis as a method for the collection and analysis of language attitudes are presented. The data for the investigation is a series of group negotiations among female and male speakers from Anglo-Australian and Greek-Australian backgrounds. (23 references) (VWL)

Analyses 476 food advertisements in newspapers from 3 different sized cities. Finds that brand names, food names, and descriptive vocabulary comprise the majority of language in food ads across newspaper groups. Offers suggestions for using newspaper ads in the classroom. (RS)

Investigates the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in choice of a name when referring to a third person during a conversation. Concludes that the social information inherent in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. (HB)

Analyzes the use and distribution of the adverbs "almost" and "nearly" based on the LOB corpus, data compiled at the universities of Lancaster (England), Oslo (Norway), and Bergen (Norway) between 1970 and 1978. (six references) (CFM)

Examines phatic processes in elderly people's response to the question "How are you?" as "negotiation" following the conversation analysis tradition of research on greetings and troubles-telling, rather than as conventionalized and desemanticized discourse. Implications for gerontological and medical research of discourse…

Study looks at frequency of noun1 + de + noun2 possessive in French prose. Researchers used chi-square and Pearson test to analyze results of syntagmatic possessive construction in works by Hugo, Stendahl, Balzac, Zola, Gide, Malraux, St. Exupery, and Sartre. Findings indicate that syntagmatic genitive possessive is more commonly found in…

Presents four principles for archive-based language research: maximum readability and minimum bias; consistent encoding for exhaustive computer search; systematic contrastiveness; and data comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. Examples from existing computer archives illustrate these and other principles, and strategies are…

Some instances of linguistic development in second-language acquisition are examined that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. Some evidence is drawn from data on the acquisition of Italian. Implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research are discussed. (61 references) (Author/LB)

Explores the role of Connected Speech Processes (CSP) in accounting for sociolinguistically significant dimensions of speech variation, and presents initial findings on the distribution of CSPs in the speech of Australian adolescents. The data were gathered as part of a wider survey of speech of Brisbane school children. (Contains 26 references.)…