The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…

This article offers a DE SE THEORY of person indexicals, wherein first- and second-person indexical pronouns indicate REFERENCE DE SE (also called SELF-ASCRIPTION). Long observed for first-person pronouns (Castaneda 1977, Kaplan 1977, Perry 1979, inter alia), self-ascription is extended here to second person as well. The person feature of a…

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form…

The Polish set of terms for blue includes, inter alia, the following adjectives: "niebieski" "blue", "blekitny" "(sky) blue", "granatowy" "navy blue", "lazurowy" "azure", "modry" "(intense) blue" and "siny" "(grey) violet-blue". The adjective "niebieski" is the basic term; however, it shares some of its functions with "blekitny", which is…

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners' interactions is a…

Discusses how linguists determine relationships of languages and group them into a family. Presents a crossword puzzle as a student activity, suitable for science and other classes, to determine the Indo-European roots of English words by a comparative method. (SK)

Although Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather "free" word order compared to major western European languages, West Greenlandic (WG) has a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. It is argued that WG behaves more like Slavic languages. (Contains 36 references.) (LB)

Proposes a model of target- and native-language proverb comparison which can be used to assist proverb analysis in the language curriculum, using examples from Mandinka, a West African language. (Author/CB)

A computer-based artificial neural network (ANN) that learns to classify sentences in a text as important or unimportant is described. The program is designed to select the sentences that are important enough to be included in composition of an abstract of the text. The ANN is embedded in a conventional symbolic environment consisting of…

The discussion of corpus planning for the Southern Quechua language variety of Peru examines issues of graphization, standardization, modernization, and renovation of Quechua in the face of increasing domination by the Spanish language. The efforts of three major groups of linguists and other scholars working on language planning in Peru, and the…

A discussion of the situation of Idoma, a Nigerian language, begins with different accounts of the language's origin, referring to both local legend and cosmology. It then proceeds to a review of modern linguists' efforts, since 1927, to classify the language. A statistical overview contains information on the number of speakers of Idoma as a…

Sociolinguistic Studies in a Data Base of Spoken Swedish (Sprakdata) is a project to describe the language from a semantic-communicative point of view. The purposes are to (1) investigate the possibility of grouping informants based on results of a semantic-communicative analysis of recorded spoken language and (2) examine possible…