The public's concern with the fate of the standard language has been well documented in the history of the complaint tradition. The print media have for centuries featured letters to the editor on questions of language use. This study examines a corpus of 258 language-related letters to the editor published in the English-speaking print media. By…

This paper presents the results of a discourse analysis of the "Chronicle of Higher Education" publications about China in 2011 and 2012. Drawing on postcolonial appropriations of governmentality to frame the discussion of globalization as the context of the study, the author analyzes the stylistic, rhetorical, and semantic strategies…

Research into language acquisition and oral language use was examined in order to identify key factors that contribute to the successful acquisition of second language (L2) listening ability. The factors were grouped into three major domains: affective, cognitive, and interpersonal. It is claimed that in each domain, proficient L2 listeners have…

A comparative analysis of four studies that emphasized linguistic similarities (rather than differences) between nonstandard speakers and other groups focused on developmental characteristics of the semantic categories encoded by nonstandard speakers compared with other speakers. Implications for language assessment are discussed. (JW)

Like legal language, medical language is a private language, a separate stratum containing some words specially defined for medical purposes, some existing only in the medical vocabulary, and some adding precision or solemnity. These characteristics often cause a breakdown in patient-doctor communication. Analysis of data obtained from prototype…

Examination of a new type of speech developing among students at the University of Yaounde reveals a highly coded usage that cuts outsiders off through the use of highly metaphorical, playful, and hermetic words that come from various sources and are reassigned different or refreshing meanings and the use of colorful expressions, word-blending,…

Two experiments indicating that children's linguistic generalizational biases change from a semantically-based system to a syntactical-structural system provide evidence for a semantic-relational bias in children's early grammars and support the notion that children's generalizational biases shift from a semantic-relational basis to a…

This paper considers four levels of analysis in the observation of the prosodic features of pause in speech: phonetic; syntactic; semantic; and informative. On the phonetic level, a pause is related to length and intonation, and intonation in turn, being a result of the speaker's meaning, constitutes an expression of his/her emotional state. On…