Examines several areas where traditional work in dialectology has proven inadequate. Outlines specific areas where sociolinguistics can make a substantial contribution. Discusses (1) the bias in dialectology toward the historical; (2) the relative lack of attention paid to the heterogeneity of the speech community and the variability of speech;…

A corpus of Black English (BEV) data is re-examined with exclusive attention to the "is" form of the copula. This analysis differs from previous examinations in that more constraints have been introduced, and the Cedergren/Sankoff computer program for multivariant analysis has been employed. The analytic techniques that are used allow for a finer…

The 74 studies cited in this selected, annotated bibliography represent major areas of research which may be useful to linguists. Structures Elicitation Techniques (SET) is a term used in contrast to naturalistic observational technique, and the methods referred to in the annotations as SETs are diverse but have in common the elicitation of…

A syntactic analysis of the language spoken by Black characters in three Black situation comedies on television; "Sanford and Son,""The Jeffersons," and "Good Times." (PD)

Considers the historical background and the demographical characteristics of those residents of St. Augustine, Florida, who are descended from the city's original Spanish and Minorcan population. Included are a list and analysis of words found in the English dialect which represent the lexical vestiges of colonial Florida Spanish. (SED)

A structured elicitation technique, convergent communication, was investigated as a means of constraining the range of linguistic data from children in K-3 without unduly constraining the naturalness of the conversation context. The convergent communication situation is a two-person problem-solving task which ensures that all communication is…

This paper reports on the Arkansas Language Survey, which had two purposes: (1) to explore the idea advanced by Labov that Americans generally have negative attitudes about their language, and to see to what extent this applies to Arkansawyers; and (2) to determine how Arkansawyers judge the way other Americans speak English. The twenty-four white…

The results of a study in which eight black kindergarten children responded to a set of structured tasks designed to elicit linguistic constructions which characterize Black English are presented and discussed in this Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) technical note. Some of the children responded with a high rate of nonstandard realizations;…

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…

Describes the attitudes of Black and White, male and female, middle- and lower-class adolescents and preadolescents in response to tape-recorded samples of standard English and Black English. (HOD)

The prepositional phrases used in free play discourse by 45 African American preschoolers from low-income homes were analyzed. A statistically significant positive relationship was found between amounts of African American English (AAE) form use and relational semantic complexity. No significant relationships were found between simpler…

Fifty-six bidialectical rural Hawaiian children participated in a study to determine whether they possessed comparable communicative competence in both dialects (Hawaiian-Creole English and standard English). The subjects, selected from kindergarten, first, third, and sixth grades, worked in groups of two to complete a communication task. Half of…

The purpose of this paper is to present systematically some facts regarding interdialectal constant and varying features of the semantics of English kinship terminology. The data present some problems for current views of grammar and of linguistic variation. Regarding the former, it is not clear what sort of "rule," what place in…

This is a report on the different types of studies of the regional varieties of French that have been carried out in Belgium from 1945 to the present. The majority of the studies have been done by Belgians, and have to do with regional varieties of French spoken in Belgium. Some, however, examine African or American varieties. Chapter 1 deals with…

This computer program, a mechanization of the handsorted techniques which geographical dialectology has been using, increases the number of hypotheses that can be explored and the various correlations that can be made. It can draw several of the kinds of maps that dialectologists have used in direct atlases. The hardware, software, and program…