The different ways of expressing a nuclear phrase from one language in another language are examined with reference to Finnish, Swedish, and French. Two specific methods of representing the root phrase in surface structure are examined in some detail. (MSE)

Surveys administered to 823 Chinese in Taiwan to measure the extent of language maintenance of mother dialects and shift toward use of Mandarin revealed a substantial shift toward the use of Mandarin. Successive family generations increasingly used Mandarin, and Mandarin was generally recognized as a common language for intergroup communication.…

Describes some of the current research on Brazilian Portuguese phonology. Various techniques are discussed that analysts utilize to investigate Brazilian Portuguese nasality. (49 references) (CB)

The history of Esperanto, a language created to promote international communication, is chronicled. Discussion focuses on the origins and development of the language, early attitudes toward its adoption, patterns of use and recognition, the development of a literature in and of Esperanto, the culture associated with the language. (Author/MSE)

Presents current concerns in the field of critical sociolinguistics in such a way that sociologists and linguists otherwise uninterested in Esperanto will see some arguments for approaching Esperanto culture as a source of new insight into fundamental aspects of society and language. (DJD)

Luo-speaking children in Kenya responded to a test using nonce forms in morphophonology. Morphophonological processes in the acquisition of Luo plurals and possessives presented different degrees of difficulty for the subjects, with the type of morphophonological alteration in a language likely to affect the rate and order of acquisition.…

Overviews the Ivory Coast's sociolinguistic situation. Standard French, restricted to the elite, is threatened by the local lingua franca. The spread and functional allocations of Dyula and Popular French support the point that the pervasive use of a language does not always lead to its adoption as a national language. (CB)

Verb forms used by 14 4-year-olds in their pretend play were investigated in a study of the use of past verb forms to express "unreality." Results suggest that different past verb forms co-occur with different play activities; e.g., present perfect occurring when children implement their plans and communicate within an already…

Examines the various strategies by which Gaelic has been employed in the newspaper press in Scotland. The prospect for a monolingual or bilingual newspaper is considered and a comparison with the uses of Gaelic on radio and television is made. (eight references) (Author/CK)

Examines the production of schwa-like elements, monosyllabic place holders (MPHs), before lexical items in early utterances of Italian children. The results of a longitudinal study of normal language acquisition in six Italian preschool children show that MPHs do not stem from imitation but actually retain important grammatical properties of…

Two experiments investigated the processing and representation of Dutch compound words as a function of their semantic transparency. The results provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. (50 references) (MDM)

Summarizes the results of Finnish studies dealing with single-word experiments with aphasics as well as lexical decisions and eye-movement registration tests performed on normals. It then proposes a processing model for Finnish nouns, Stem Allomorph/Inflectional Decomposition (SAID), which predicts that both inflected and productive derived forms…

Describes the grammaticalization of the Swedish word "bara" (English "just") in present-day adolescent speech. "Bara" has in the last 15 years been used with 2 new functions in spoken, narrative discourse: to foreground central events and to introduce quotations. (40 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the factors that constrain and promote the selection of noun compound types in spoken and written Hebrew. Three types of data were examined, one spoken and two written. Lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses revealed that construct-state compounds are the default form for expressing relations. (55 references) (Author)

This article describes "language" use in a religious domain where the very notion of 'language' must be defined in a qualitatively special way. It is suggested that within the traditional Islamic educational system, Arabic among the Kanuri of northeast Nigeria is first acquired as a "graphic," an invisible whole that, by its…