The "Southwest" dialect, previously isolated in San Antonio, Texas, has been isolated south of that area. Data were drawn from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and interviews with ten lower-middle/upper-lower class informants. Seven communities were represented by seven female and three male English speakers (four…

Five papers on bilingualism are presented. "Giving Transfer a Boost--Describing Transfer Variation in Learners' Interlanguage Performance" by Claus Faerch suggests, outlines, and illustrates a heuristic principle for describing the result of positive transfer from one language to another, based on the assumption that learners maximize…

This work is an attempt to synthesize the findings of the multi-disciplinary research on various aspects of Chicanos' use of their two languages, Spanish and English. After an introduction on notions of language, speech, and sociology, the text covers nine aspects of the question: (1) historical background on the relations between the English and…

Discusses the influence of French and English on the Akwesasne Mohawk language over the last three centuries. Linguistic and sociocultural influences are shown. (NCR)

An etymological comparison of Taiwanese words and their Mandarin equivalents revealed that 30 percent of words found in sampled running texts have different etymons, with a high percentage of same etymons between Taiwanese and Mandarin content words and a lower rate of same etymons between Taiwanese and Mandarin function words. (Author/CB)

A study of second language acquisition in two Japanese children, and corresponding examination of research literature, led to this effort to clarify terminology related to cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Terms include: bilingualism, code-switching, language mixing, language transfer, and borrowing. Two forms of transfer…

Spanish-English code switching in the context of Miami health care services is examined, focusing on the transactional role relationships that require Spanish language use. Examples are taken from printed sources and oral language. Semantic shift, vocabulary adaptation, syntactic code switching, and Spanish acquisition by non-Hispanics are…

Discusses hybrid verbs as a linguistic product of the anglophone cultural influence on the Spanish spoken by Cubans in southeastern Florida. (NCR)

Presents an advertisement from "Der Spiegel," composed in English that is saturated with Germanisms. Teaching procedures based on this are suggested: finding and classifying errors, composing alternative versions, translating into German, retranslating into English. Suggestions are given for further work based on the students' own…

Argues, with a theoretical focus, that evidence of cross-linguistic influences on language use can and ought to be enlisted in second language (L2) attrition research to clean up "spontaneous speech data." Notes that since L2 attrition researchers have little control over the content of the spontaneous speech data they use, they need the…

Examines a code mixed variety of English and Hindi called Filmi English, which reflects the linguistic influence of the Indian film industry. A corpus of more than 2,000 intrasentential code-mixed sentences drawn from a film magazine, "Stardust," is analyzed. (Author/OD)

Examines code mixing and borrowing across two generations of New York Puerto Ricans, and explores the possibility of existence of a lifecycle of language use in the community. (26 references) (Author/OD)

Assesses verb phrase development in three Trinidadian children in which Standard English and Trinidad Creole coexist. Adverbials were found to be crucial in delineating specific areas of semantic intent. (20 references) (GLR)

Develops analytical techniques to determine "borrowability," the ease with which a lexical item or category of lexical items can be borrowed by one language from another. These techniques are then applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts. (29 references) (MDM)

Demonstrates that the patterns of Japanese/English code-switching found in Canadian Niseis' in-group speech are conditioned by the varieties of bilingual speech characterized in terms of base language. When Japanese is the base, English nouns are used; when English is the base, Japanese phrases and sentences occur sporadically. (38 references)…