A study investigated the use of tag questions in the private conversations of Swedish men and women. Conversations took place in single-gender dyads (six with two men and six with two women) and six mixed-gender dyads. Informants were aged approximately 25 or approximately 50, of different social classes, chosen by random selection, and asked to…

The greeting systems in Nepali are derived from the Hindu ethos and religious culture, and can be traced back to Hindu sacred writing. However, as tied to conventions as they are, these systems are also the product of an interplay of socio-cultural factors. A study found that despite exposure to education and Western culture, Nepali modes of…

Current language policy planning in Ireland was examined as part of a larger study of the language behavior of groups with access or exposure to more than one language. Language can be seen as a resource to ethnic groups primarily in their competition for access to the goods and services of a nation. The norm for groups in prolonged contact is…

A study examines various Huastec clause types that are reflexive in some sense, including ordinary reflexives, which involve co-reference. Two mutually exclusive morphosyntactic devices are used in Huastec: reflexive pronouns and verbal morphology. In this way, Huastec is like various European languages. Clauses involving reflexive pronouns and…

An autosegmental analysis of Kagate tone is presented. The focus is on tonal instability, which occurs as the result of a compensatory lengthening process. To account for facts of tonal stability, previously hypothesized, and tonal instability, it is proposed that the location of tone within the overall geometry is subject to parametric variation,…

The curriculum for Manitoba's heritage language instruction program in Polish outlines the curriculum's rationale and design and suggests techniques and materials for carrying out instruction. Introductory sections discuss general program goals and specific objectives of the program. Subsequent sections outline in greater detail the curricula for…

An analysis of vowel distribution patterns in Rawas, an Austronesian language spoken in Sumatra, is presented. The language has six vowels, each with long and short variants in complementary distribution, and five diphthongs that occur generally in open syllables. It is proposed, based on this analysis, that each Rawas syllable is precisely two…

A dictionary of Thai sign language outlines and illustrates the vocabulary and structure of the sign language used by the deaf community throughout Thailand. It reflects the Thai lexical structure, with the signs arranged into six basic sign groups (movement verbs, oppositions, negation, verb tenses, dimensions, and a category containing days,…

An analysis of differences in politeness between Japanese and English focuses on those that affect the relative imposition involved in a request. Introductory sections draw on previous research and theory, and discuss general linguistic and cultural principles underlying requests, politeness, and politeness strategies. Four rules for times when a…

The paper explores the significance of a contrast between generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), a context-free grammar with a well structured theory of features, and head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), a mechanism for increasing the power of GPSG by introducing head-wrapping and lexical rules, using examples from Mandarin Chinese.…

The distributional and interpretive properties of the reciprocal "selo" in Korean are analyzed and compared with reciprocals in other languages, particularly Japanese and English. It is proposed that if it can be assumed that there are two homophonous "selos" in Korean, four of the five idiosyncratic properties of…

This dissertation presents a study of patterns of speech in Western Subanon, as heard in areas of Mindanao, an island in the Philippines. An introductory section discusses relevant general issues in linguistic research and the present study. The relationships of language to linguistics and of language to society, the objectives of the study, the…

An analysis of Korean case marking proposes an explanation for several aspects of marking, especially stacking and spreading, from a lexical perspective. The explanation has advantages over previous theories in that (1) it explains the morphology of Korean case marking without reference to several levels of syntactic derivation, including…

A study investigated Japanese children's acquisition of the syntactical subcategorization of action verbs. Aspects of caregiver language that provide children with information about the characteristics of an action verb are detailed, and the utterances of four Japanese toddlers are analyzed for their usage characteristics. Caregiver sentences are…

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…