THIS PAPER PRESENTS SEVERAL THEORETICAL PROPOSITIONS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY WITHIN A NATION AND WITHIN ITS SUBPARTS OR REGIONS. THE PROPOSITIONS DESCRIBED ARE EQUALLY VALID FOR THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ANY AREAL UNIT AND ITS COMPONENT PARTS AND MAY THUS BE APPLIED TO A CITY AND ITS DISTRICTS OR TO A PROVINCE AND ITS…

THE AUTHOR RECOUNTS THE RISE IN IMPORTANCE OF MACHINE TRANSLATION, WHICH TOGETHER WITH LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING COMPRISE THE MAJOR FIELDS OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS. MUCH OF THE RECENT THEORETICAL WORK ON LANGUAGE DEALS WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SURFACE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE AND THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE. THE…

THIS PAPER DEALS WITH THE SEMANTIC PHENOMENA WHICH UNDERLIE THE SURFACE STRUCTURE OCCURRENCE (OR NONOCCURRENCE) IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF ENGLISH NOUNS OF SUCH ITEMS AS THE DEFINITE AND INDEFINITE ARTICLES AND THE PLURAL SUFFIX. THE INFLECTION OF ENGLISH NOUNS IS DISCUSSED IN SEMANTIC TERMS. RULES ARE GIVEN FOR THE GENERATION OF THESE INFLECTIONS IN…

This paper is the first in a compilation of articles reprinted by NCTE from the journal "Elementary English" and entitled "On the Dialects of Children." It comprises an overview of recent research in regional and social dialects in the United States. The "Linguistic Atlas of New England," the first section of the "Linguistic Atlas of the United…

This paper discusses the notion that comprehension of language involves an active interpretative process entailing both a generating of expectations and a matching of expectations to the "incoming message." There are, however, two forms of discourse in which the relation of text to message differs from that holding in ordinary language.…

Many linguists and sociolinguists are interested in the relationship between ethnocentrism and language and in how the desire of ethnic groups to maintain their cultural distinctiveness influences linguistic variation. This paper suggests diverse ways in which ethnocentrism and the desire to increase social distance may be realized on several…

The study analyzes, for readability and difficulty, the language of 50 commonly used application forms. The forms were compared with respect to length, readability, t-unit density, and word-length variables. Forms were also compared against two word-frequency lists. Results show that many of the words appearing often on forms do not appear on the…

This report reviews experimental techniques that have been used to assess sentence comprehension by preschool children and describes a new technique, word monitoring, which permits an assessment of the momentary demands made upon sentence-processing mechanisms as a child listens to a sentence. (The time it takes the child to push a button in…

This investigation explored the conversational practices and conversational rule-conformity of children aged four, six, and eight. Procedures included observation of the conversational behavior of children in classroom interaction among peers and a controlled laboratory investigation of the conversations of 18 children, of varying age levels, who…

Presented are rules of sign language structure which have provided a framework for linguistic analysis in a project studying the acquisition of sign language by 10 deaf children of deaf parents. Two levels of rules are outlined: definition rules, which deal with definitions of terms used in the analysis and their relation to terms used in other…

A set of data collected by researchers at the University of California at Riverside and presented to the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) is described in this document. The data consist of 14 hours of recorded interviews of 60 Mexican-American children in Riverside in grades 1-3. Comments are directed at the linguistic characteristics of the…

Experiments in teaching language or language-like behavior to chimpanzees and other primates may bear on the problem of the origin of language. Evidence appears to support the theory that man's first language was gestural. Recent pongid language experiments suggest: (1) a capacity for language is not solely human and therefore does not represent…

This paper examines the acquisition of English fricatives and is a preliminary report on one aspect of the Child Phonology Project at Stanford University. A characterization of English fricatives is presented, followed by a summary of current information on their acquisition. Three sample hypotheses from the Stanford project are discussed in…

This textbook establishes principles and methodology for researching and analyzing the morphological systems of languages. The sequence of approach used in the text begins with procedures for the identification of morphemes and deals with types, distribution, structural classes, and meanings of morphemes. The final chapters present field…

This paper describes seven experiments related to human communication research. The first two experiments discuss studies treating the aural responses of listeners. The third experiment was undertaken to estimate the information of sounds and diagrams which might lead to an estimate of the redundancy ascribed to the phonetic structure of words. A…