In New Zealand, interest in the local variety of English is increasing. Reasons for this are given. A brief survey is made of: semantic changes, the role of Maori words, neologisms and phonetic changes. Parallels are shown with the history of British English. (IFS/WGA)

Research has shown that intersentential code switching is related to conversational structure. This article argues that insertion can be explained in these terms as well. Draws on Halliday's and Hasan's (1976) notion of cohesive tie, claims that insertions are a consequence of the bilingual speaker's attempt to create coherence between utterances…

A discussion of changes in popular expressions and their relationship to cultural and ideological change looks at the emergence and borrowing of the term "cocooning" and several other morphological trends. (MSE)

The strong influence of German on the English language is illustrated, and nearly 100 German loanwords related to food and drink are listed. The terms are described in their cultural, historical, and etymological context. (Author/LB)

Introductory comments to a special journal issue on communicative accommodation provide a framework within which the accompanying articles can be examined. Terminology and field methods are described for this frontier area of sociolinguistic study and more sociolinguistic analysis is advocated. (50 references) (LB)

Presents an analysis of the two passive (or passive-like) constructions in Singapore English which exhibit substrate influence from Malay and Chinese. The paper shows that while substrate languages contribute to the grammar of Singapore English, the continued prestige of standard English exerts normative pressure and mitigates the effect of…

Discusses one highly visible and often stigmatized feature of Chicano Spanish--lexical innovation due to intimate contact with English and mainstream culture. Discusses socio- and psycholinguistic factors that play a role in loanword formation. (Author/VWL)

Introduces articles in this journal volume on bilingual borrowing. Each paper carries out two methodological imperatives: (1) All are focused on well-defined speech communities using a standard social network; (2) most authors were members of the communities and data was collected from interactions with their own close contacts. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the optional forms and indeterminacy of Japanese orthography. Investigates a corpus of loanwords in Japanese. Besides looking at phonology, other subtle features are examined to determine when and why one spelling is used over another. (Author/VWL)

This article presents an empirical and theoretical critique of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2001), and includes a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2002) (JMSG) critique of MacSwan (1999, 2000) and reactions to their revision of the MLF model as a "modified minimalist approach." The…

The rate of assimilation of individual features to their target phonetic constraints varies as a function of the general target constraint itself, the segment class affected by the constraint, and the syllable involved. This rate is hypothesized as a measure of the strength or productivity of the phonological rule. (Author/DB)

States that sound translation practice rests on a clear understanding of linguistic and cultural constraints combined with a punctilious search for equivalences. Describes various levels of constraint and proposes a statistical investigation of the degree of freedom left to translators, suggesting that most of the translated text results from…

Discusses use of cognates and common loan words as way to teach German vocabulary to English speakers to help build new passive vocabulary more rapidly in target language. (BK)

Examines language frontier and transitional zones along the Belgium-northwestern France linguistic border as area occupying important position in linguistic contact research. Gives examples of variant forms in the morphosyntactic, semantic, stylistic, and lexical forms. (Author/BK)

Alaska, with its history of Russian colonization, has a large stock of Russian loanwords. The majority of the loanwords discussed are for cultural and concrete items and are substances, emerging as noun words, to which paragogic endings are agglutinated. (NCR)