Summary of author's doctoral dissertation, "Syntactic and Semantic Elements of Students' Oral and Written Discourse: Implications for Teaching Composition, Stanford Univ., 1967.

This is a bibliography on the Hmong of Laos who are part of a larger group of people commonly referred to in the literature as the Miao. The bibliography is divided into eight sections: (1) background material and volumes which include references to the Hmong; (2) items which specifically refer to Hmong culture and history; (3) ethnographic works…

Census data from 1901-1971 on the status of Welsh in Wales are used to illustrate the problems of making language planning recommendations on the basis of limited and scale-specific analyses. Using maps and charts, the data are analysed at national, regional, local, and individual levels. Different patterns of language maintenance and usage emerge…

In order to help explain language variation and promote an understanding of spatial networks and diffusion patterns, data from the records of the Survey of English Dialects (SED) are analyzed with respect to geolinguistics. The data include all recorded instances of words with morpheme-final consonant clusters for all 75 interviews with older…

Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions is extended to include Lewis' basic categories. The distinction as applied to sentences is brought out by investigating the consequences of the failure of presupposed sentences. Stalnaker uses Donnellan's distinction to support his theory of creating an…

The speech of 18 children aged 4;1 to 7;1 during role-playing sessions simulating family, doctor, and classroom situations was analyzed for the use of directives. Six categories of directive formula types were identified, and the use of each of these in each context was examined with a view to determining the child's sense of what directive is…

Children and adults participated in two speech perception experiments in which they listened to recorded consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words in random order and resPonded by indicating which number of a word-pair they had heard. Some but not all stimuli that were intended to induce perceptual cross-over were successful in getting subjects to…

The position taken in this paper is that the sentence adverb should be viewed not as an occurrence within a sentence but as a kind of illocutionary force marker of a speech art. Three points are argued in the paper: (1) that current linguistic analyses of sentence adverbs are inadequate even to the purposes of the analysts; (2) that treating…

Gestures of six young adults were transcribed from videotaped narrations. Iconic, or imitative, gestures were found to have a tendency to depict whole scenes, and to correlate positively with motions implied in accompanying verbs. Gestures were found to be marked for such contrasting grammatical features as agent and patient, and transitive and…

The ability of children to process words printed in a second language was studied over the course of a school year as the children acquired increasing familiarity with the language. The children, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, represented four ability groups with respect to their reading skills in their first and second languages. A…

Fifteen English-speaking and fifteen French-speaking preschool children were each videotaped during two play sessions, one with a native and one with a non-native peer. Length of verbal utterances toward the non-native listener was significantly lower than toward the native listener, supporting the notion that native speakers adapt the amount of…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

It is contended that there are such things as discourse blocs, and that they are composed of discourse units glued together into a contextuated whole by bloc signals. There are three kinds of structures with which it is necessary to deal in order to discuss coherent discourse: the discourse bloc, the discourse unit, and the bloc signal.…

An exploratory study investigated the communicative behaviors that differentiate talkative from reticent children. Four three-year-old girls who varied in degree of talkativeness were observed in naturalistic interactions with six to eight previously unfamiliar adults. All four children had demonstrated age-appropriate knowledge of linguistic…

The nature of grammatical relations such as subject and object are examined. The ways in which subjects differ from language to language are described and the way in which a language can do without a subject relation is revealed. Three primitive functional properties of sentences which underlie the syntactic relations of subject and topic are…