This article examines one of the ways in which matters of truth, appropriateness, and acceptability are raised and managed within the course of everyday conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we show that by repeating what another participant has said and doing so with a high rise-fall intonation contour, a speaker claims…

In Inner Mongolia, those Mongolian students face lots of difficulties in learning English. Especially the English translation ability of Mongolian students is a weak point. It is worth to think a problem that how to let our students use the English freely on a certain foundation. This article investigates the problems of Mongolian English learners…

In order to explore the impact of a degraded semantic system on the structure of language production, we analysed transcripts from autobiographical memory interviews to identify naturally-occurring speech errors by eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched normal speakers. Relative to controls, patients were significantly…

Examination of parental responses to their young children's (N=3) inflectional over-regularizations and wh-question auxiliary-verb omission errors suggested that two of the children's parents followed ill-formed utterances with expansions and clarification questions. Such corrective responses dropped out of children's input as they continued to…

This analysis looks at the humorous use of second-speaker repeats to initiate conversational repair. It is proposed that consideration of joking repeats forces reanalysis of the organization of conversational repair. The preference analysis theory is rejected in favor of a locally governed analysis of conversational repair in which participants…

Thirty-two hearing-impaired adolescents were assessed on comprehension of three anaphoric forms within conjoined sentences: repeated noun, personal pronouns, and null form. The null form anaphora in a semantically acceptable environment, in which some hearing-impaired students apply a deviant object-subject deletion rule, was significantly more…

Discussion of the use of computerized concordancers (computer software packages that enable large quantities of text to be searched for all occurrences of a particular lexical item) focuses on their potential as a tool for students to use in learning a second language. In considering the pedagogical value of such tools, three areas are considered.…

Consonant harmony, a complex phonological assimilation in which segments (usually consonants, but sometimes even vowels) become identical, which occurs in the speech of young children and adult aphasics, is analyzed, particularly as it occurs in Finnish-speakers. Consonant harmony has an articulatory basis: it is a trend toward repetition of the…