The study examines strategies multilingual children use to interpret grammatical relations, focusing on their two primary languages, Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. Both languages use mixed systems for indicating grammatical relations. In both languages ergative-absolutive case-marking indicates core arguments, but to different extents in…

Confronted with the problem of determining the frequency of syntactical patterns in present-day written Australian English, the author employs a method of analysis which produces an output in the form of a two-dimensional line diagram showing all the syntagms comprising the sentence under analysis. For the remaining problem of sorting the diagrams…

Children's mastery of reading skills would be facilitated if reading programs capitalized on children's already-developed oral language competence. Barriers against "reading for meaning" exist when the cues used for predicting in oral language are not present in the written language which confronts children; yet anaylses of four reading…

Analyzes functional linguistic variables (sentence beginnings, frequency of verb types, material between subject and verb, end-sentence cohesion patterns) in hard news and human interest stories in "The Houston Post." Results supported functional theories about word order. Proportions of verb types in news stories differed from those in…

Direct links between Australian English and the Australian culture are drawn. The author proposes ways in which a linguistically precise and culturally revealing study of linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to Australian society, history, culture, and "national…

The conference aimed to provide a forum for discussion of a wide variety of issues that relate to Interpreting and Translation, to share research results, training strategies and practice experiences, and to focus on the relationship between research, training, and practice. Papers include: "What Do We on translation and interpreting include:…

Examines how one approach to the study of language, ethno-methodological conversation analysis, accomplishes the integration of linguistic phenomena into the practical continuum of human activity. It is concluded that an integrational rhetoric should and can produce close, detailed, empirical analyses of situated discursive action. (51 references)…

Discusses the linguistic systems of children of Italian immigrants in Australia and the children's mastery of standard Italian and various dialects. Also reviews evidence for claims of the emergence of a new linguistic form labelled "Australitalian." (EKN)

Examines the language strategies used in everyday explanation by young heterosexual Australian college students to attribute blame for the transmission of HIV. Finds that speakers blamed outgroups more than ingroups; blamed outgroups at higher levels of responsibility than ingroups; but did not use more justifications for ingroups. Notes overt…

Comparative research indicates that almost without exception, late eighteenth century non-standard English pronunciation was very close to what is called Broad Australian. Present Australian English is closely akin to the blended, popular colloquial London English, spoken by the largest group of Australia's first settlers. This pronunciation…

A language evaluation instrument was devised to assess the accuracy of program implementation by teachers of four Australian preschool programs. The Teacher Language Instrument (TLI) categorizes each verbal episode of a teaching interchange for both mode and function. Five general mode categories of teacher language behavior--statements,…

The linguistic abilities demonstrated by second grade students show a high level of competence in the use of syntactic structures and lexicon. This report describes and interprets, in terms of language function, the talking and writing of fifteen Australian children. Transcripts of conversations provide the basis for the linguistic analysis and…

This paper focuses on an information gap task that was part of a larger critical action research project that sought to expand talk opportunities for children in multilingual classrooms. Little of the previous research on tasks and language learning has focused on children learning English as an additional language in the context of diverse,…

The report details results of a research project to monitor and map the literacy development of three learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) studying in an Australian English program for adult migrants. The objective was to gain a longitudinal picture of their reading and writing development over a period of nine months. Five additional…

Although the Italian system of address pronouns is relatively complex, scant attention is paid to the issue in L2 manuals designed for English-speaking learners of Italian. After showing that Italian L2 manuals are not necessarily accurate in the limited detail they provide, we examine specifically the frequent claim that so-called informal…