Describes the linguistic backgrounds of Sweden and Finland and presents a few examples of recent sociolinguistic research in these countries. (CFM)

Reviews current research to investigate the way the power and politics of genre is often exploited by the so-called established membership of disciplinary communities to keep outsiders at a safe distance. Argues that the privilege to exploit generic conventions to create new forms becomes available only to those few enjoying a certain degree of…

Notes that the "Comparative Austronesian Dictionary" (CAD) is one of a series of comparative dictionaries planned to cover the major world language families. The CAD provides detailed information on 80 languages and additional data on the history of the Austronesian (AN) languages. Adds that the CAD gives reliable citations in a broad…

Examines the role that Universal Grammar (UG) plays in the early stages of the acquisition of Japanese as a second language (L2) by adults. Addresses whether a nonparametrized principle of UG that is instantiated in the first language (L1) is "active enough" in the early stages of L2 learning to apply to phenomena for which there are no…

Evaluates the contribution of Coupland's research project on language and aging from the perspective of an African interest in gerontology. Argues that some of the underlying concepts need to be reconsidered if the project is to be extended to a different context. Outlines the strengths and frustrations inherent in multidisciplinary research. (17…

Looks at systematicity from the perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity that have been addressed separately in past studies of article acquisition. Examines how these discourse universals account for patterns of article use and nonuse in narratives written by Finnish- and Swedish-speaking learners of English.…

Argues that crossing the boundaries between sociolinguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) is essential to both fields of study. Specifically, data collected in an investigation of the SLA of copula choice by 77 English-speaking learners of Spanish are examined in terms of similarities to data collected in studies of language change.…

Cites and summarizes essays and reports of research on second and foreign language writing and writing instruction that became available during the period from October 1, 2002 to March 31, 2003. (Author/VWL)

Examines the needs of law students in Israel, finding that while the amount of English needed by law students in law school may be diminishing, the importance of the English language cases they do read is increasing. (VWL)

Presents a research bibliography on English in China. Most of the citations refer to works in English, but where possible, references have been made to relevant Chinese language sources. (Author/VWL)

Explores the relevance and usefulness of a new paradigm, variously named connectionism or parallel distributed processing, involving the application of the computer sciences, to the teaching of foreign languages. (53 references) (CB)

Examines speech samples of a boy 2;4 to 2;11 to determine the relationship between speech disturbances and language production process development. Disfluencies were randomly distributed during the first half of the observation period, then concentrated in function words and sentence initial words, reflecting an emerging speech component dedicated…

Discusses four general areas of linguistics studies that are particularly relevant to literacy issues: (1) discourse analysis, including text analysis, spoken and written language, and home and school discourse; (2) relationships between speech and writing, the distance between dialects and written norms, and developmental writing; (3)…

Punctuation in its elocutionary function serves as a set of instructions for reading aloud. In its syntactic function, it serves to convey meaning. Results of a study indicated that many people retain the belief in the elocutionary purpose of punctuation and are insensitive to its syntactic function. (JD)

Describes a study that sought to characterize the Scotch-Irish influence on the dialect of southeastern Pennsylvania in particular and American English in general. A questionnaire was used to obtain lexical and grammatical data from 97 subjects. The study concludes that the Scotch-Irish linguistic heritage is rapidly disappearing. (19 references)…