Public interest in language is strong, as evidenced by recent articles on spoken and written forms of contemporary English in major news magazines. The December 8, 1975 issue of "Newsweek" contains several allegations, notably by Mario Pei, castigating linguists for causing the decline in writing ability in the United States. In this paper an…

Speech play reflects a degree of selectivity and creativity beyond ordinary language use. Consistent with the approach of ethnography, each culture may have its own definition of speech play. Articles collected in this volume investigate speech play as language structure--"Play Languages: Implications for (Socio) Linguistics,""Secret Play…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between self concept and communicative behavior of Upward Bound students as shown through computer-assisted content analysis. Nineteen Upward Bound students at Bowling Green State University during the summer of 1971 composed the population for this study. The methodology used in this…

Politeness is discussed as an integral part of human conversational interaction. Awareness of politeness is important to understanding proper language usage. Several sentences may perform the same function but vary in tone from a command to an extremely polite request. Foreign language instruction should expose learners to politeness and the…

A native speaker of a language possesses both grammatical and rhetorical competence. A grammatical model, in its deep structure, represents an "is a" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of a human being as a human being. A rhetorical model represents a "counts as" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of…

This paper examines the language used by workers in a china factory in order to present the characteristics and underlying features of occupational jargon. The paper shows: (1) jargon is affected by regional-local pronunciation, grammatical expressions and lexical items, and by individual speech styles which result from general linguistic…

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the writing of elementary children, grades four through six, to determine the relationship between specified genre and the development and use of figurative language. Three teachers, one each in grades four, five, and six in the Metropolitan School District of Perry Township, Indiana, collected…

The first section of this paper is a general discussion of standard English. The nine sections which follow discuss the concept of correctness and the ideological differences between grammarians and purists; standard English in a historical perspective; Eric Partridge's (1969) taxonomy of the degrees and kinds of standard English, including…

This is an analysis of the stylistic variation in English of a wide range of speakers. A main point is that in analyzing speech styles it is important to elecit more than one style from each speaker, as both interview conditions and other factors may influence style. The paper presents some concrete examples of two major stylistic divisions,…

In this study, 100 second graders from a midwestern city were given an oral syntax test which measured seventeen syntactic competencies and a parallel written syntax test. Metropolitan reading and Slosson intelligence tests were also administered. Significant relationships between syntax attainment and reading achievement (R = .70) and between…

The purpose of the research covered by this final report was to produce a Javanese-English dictionary, the first ever to exist. Source materials were of two major kinds: (1) pre-Revolution sources: the two most recetnly published Javanese dictionaries (see Bibliography, Pigeaud and Poerwadarminta), predating the 1945 Indonesian war for…

This paper discusses the subject of fragments as they appear in the writing of college freshmen. It examines the conditions under which certain syntactic constructions are identified as fragments and the reasons for designating some of these fragments as nonpenalty and others as penalty types. The fragment is viewed here as a syntactic…

The governmental process entails a great deal of talk and writing. Much political language is informal, and some is official. In either case, its linguistic categorizations shape perceptions and feelings about problematic and controversial public issues, reflecting and playing upon the ambivalence and changing perspectives of all who are involved.…

To speak, write, and react to language with awareness is to live at least somewhat more fully than to be oblivious to the manifold nuances and potentialities of language. With this idea in mind, the rationales, strategies, and implications of three language-related assignments for advanced composition are presented. The first assignment asks…

This report, the first of a series of three, describes a study of the structure and use of language in a defined type of communication situation. Following a review of psychological, sociological, and linguistic studies dealing with the structure of communication or the structure of discourse, a type of goal-directed (convergent) communication is…