Hospitality patterns of the Bororo Indians are illustrated in two examples: the etiquette due to a visiting chief from another Bororo village, and the etiquette due any common visitor from another Bororo village. Formal hospitality differs greatly from the usual etiquette. At a visiting chief's arrival, he enters as the last of his group and waits…

The paper outlines the "sociology of acceptance" as a theoretical framework for understanding relationships between people with mental retardation and typical people. Sociocultural perspectives on deviance are reviewed and their contribution to the study of mental retardation is considered. The paper next examines the nature of accepting…

A study of the lyrics of popular music was conducted to test the hypothesis that from the 1950s through the 1970s such songs placed a progressively greater emphasis upon physical as opposed to emotional love. Researchers analyzed the lyrics of the five most popular songs listed in "Billboard" magazine during every year from 1950 to 1980.…

Following a brief discussion of some characteristics of the Amish culture, data on work study skills from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills are reported for 23 pupils in grades 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 in Pleasant Hill School near Bloomfield, Iowa. Percentile ranks ranged from 5 to 83. Eleven pupils scored above the fifteenth percentile on map skills and on…

A careful study of second language varieties (SLVs) of English, which have not yet entered the mainstream of sociolinguistic research because of neglect and misunderstanding, shows that they are qualitatively different from the categories recognized in current sociolinguistic typology. SLVs provide some of the clearest evidence of sociocultural…

In order to develop an understanding of the history of childhood, an interdisciplinary approach is needed. Such an analysis presents special challenges, since different traditions of inquiry and interpretation generate different research questions and correspondingly divergent versions of the past and its relationship to the present. At this point…

One particular death and the rituals, funeral ceremony, and mourning which followed it are used to explore the relationship of the living to death. The particular death described was one which occurred during a year of fieldwork among urban Punjabis. By examining the category of mourners, it was possible to discern a structure within which grief…

This paper summarizes ethnic and other subcultural differences in drinking behavior and drinking problems, with primary emphasis upon the series of U.S. national surveys conducted by the author's Social Research Group during the last 15 years. The author discusses comparative findings from surveys conducted by others in several European countries,…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

This paper analyzes the prophetic speech of Ga spirit mediums in terms of its linguistic style and its socio-religious function. As used in the study, "prophetic speech" is understood to have two major characteristics: (1) glossolalic style, and (2) prophetic message content, and it is used by people believed to be possessed by spirits. Prophetic…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

Argues that progress in satellite communications depends upon the assurance that satellites are useful to people in all countries, and that a world television network and a worldwide packet data communication system would help achieve that goal, and asserts that direct-satellite television broadcasting does not represent, at present, an active…

Discusses the mass media and education, arguing that the crucial phenomenon is the industrialization of the mind: the mind-making industry is viewed as a product of the last hundred years which has developed at such a pace and assumed such varied forms that it has outgrown understanding and control. (Author/JM)

Reviews some of the current literature on the sociolinguistic aspects of ESL. (RM)