Presents study of elocutionary forces behind indirect speech acts, such as rhetorical questions, in English and Italian, by using contrastive analysis of form, frequency distribution of questions, and uses and negativity of rhetorical questions. Concludes the rhetorical questions in English and Italian, and perhaps many more languages, may be…

Examines the German "werden-" passives and their English counterparts identifying four basic constraints on the inclusion of "being" in the English passive construction. Uses contrastive analysis to explain the ambiguity of the English past participle, and orders the constraints on the use of "being" sequentially…

Replies critically to the article by D. K. Stevenson and R. J. Brunt, "Living English: Seeing the Forest in Spite of the Trees -- On Differences between American English and British English," in this journal, issue 1979/2. A reply by Stevenson and Brunt continues the controversy. (IFS/WGA)

A framework is provided for the description and contrastive analysis of limited-domain syntactic choice in English and French. Using a corpus of naturally occurring English and French sets of instructional texts, the expressions available in each language for conveying the two procedural semantic relations of "generation" and "enablement" are…

Explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. Presents evidence of extensive glide weakening in the African-American community in Memphis and compares it to the degree and contexts of glide weakening in the European-American community. (Author/VWL)

Used cross-language blocking experiments to test the hypothesis that children learning to read inconsistent orthographies would show considerable flexibility in making use of spelling-sound correspondences at different unit sizes, whereas children learning to read consistent orthographies should mainly employ small-size grapheme-phoneme…

Outlines some of the major differences in the use of punctuation between French and English, discussing such items as the period, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, and quotation marks. (MSE)

Challenges the belief that the intonation of yes/no questions in American English is different from that of standard British English. Reports on a study that shows that American speakers of English do not distinguish between the high-rising and low-rising intonation, and argues that the supposed difference in intonation between the two varieties…

Demonstrates that the substitution of a foreign segment in the borrowing of a database, which includes 14,350 segmental malformations from French and English loanwords in eight distinct languages, involves its replacement by a single native placement. This tendency is without exception, other than in cases where nasal vowels are concerned.…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

Four experiments explored French-learning infants' ability to segment words from fluent speech. The focus was on bisyllabic words to investigate whether infants segment them as whole words or segment each syllable individually. No segmentation effects were found in 8-month-olds. Twelve-month-olds segmented individually both the final syllables…

Conditions favoring the development of the three major types of vowel-harmony systems: horizontal, palatal, and labial are examined in terms of correlations between sonority, contiguity, or phonetic distance on the one hand and relative assimilability of vowels on the other. Broadly speaking, the less sonorous, the more contiguous, and the closer…

The Japanese syllabary of today would probably not exist in its present arrangement had it not been for Sanskrit studies in Japan. Scholars of ancient Japan extracted from the Devanagari those sounds which corresponded to sounds in Japanese and arranged the Japanese syllabary in the devanagari order. First appearing in a document dated 1204, this…

Reference to the native tongue is considered necessary in FL teaching. Differences and congruence of meaning in the two languages are examined with respect to their help or hindrance in language learning. Using examples, the problems of inferring the meaning of the foreign word are examined. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Discusses the role of the Ancient Near East in the history of linguistics. (DD)