Uses eight languages in five distinct linguistic areas to examine two hypotheses regarding text generation and analysis and to illustrate their reciprocity relative to narrative discourse. Demonstrates how these hypotheses yield salience schemes and constituent analysis which mutually corroborate and correct each other. (KEH)

Recent research has shown that transfer operates on the discourse as well as the phonological, semantic, and syntactic levels. This is the case with relative clauses (RCs) used by Chinese students of English. RCs are less frequent in Chinese and their low incidence in interlanguage production by such students is a case of transfer, not avoidance.…

A study examined interactional patterns in interviews that characterize elicitation of one text type, description, including type/mixture of questions asked by the fieldworker and the speaker's response. Subjects (n=137) were of three ethnic groups and three socioeconomic levels. Results suggest questioning strategy can have strong, predictable…

A study investigated the pragmatic success and failure of requests when expressed in Portuguese or in English. Subjects were 40 college students who were administered a discourse-completion instrument in 2 versions (English and Portuguese) comprised of 10 situations, or 5 pairs in which each pair was related to a different social situation.…

This study analyzed the pronunciation of English interdental fricatives by two native speakers of Turkish, focusing on whether there was systematic variation of forms according to the kind of discourse and the surrounding phonemes. Subjects were two adult Turkish learners of English as a Second Language, both of whom had been in the United States…

A study demonstrates the existence of a wartime register in Japanese newspaper journalism and characterizes its major linguistic and stylistic features. Special emphasis is placed on the aspect of modality as related to point of view. Modality expresses the mode within which the propositional content of a sentence is presented as certain,…

The unique position of WH words in Slavic languages is discussed, with specific reference to Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The multiple fronting characteristics of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian differ in terms of the following positions and behaviors: extraction from embedded questions; clitic placement and other indications of constituent status;…

This paper attempts to show the relationship between variable rules and more widely used psycholinguistic constructs such as amalgams and schemas, and to point out how variationists' methods can be useful in the study of language acquisition. The traditional rule, the rule for forming the past tense of regular verbs in English, is discussed as it…

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,…

This paper considers a distinction frequently used in sociolinguistics and ethnography of speaking to describe speech events: their formality or informality. Three principle meanings of "formality" found in the literature concern whether the formality relates to properties of a communicative code, properties of the social setting in…

SEX DIFFERENCES IN READING ACHIEVEMENT RESULTING FROM USE OF TWO DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING READING IN THE FIRST GRADE WERE STUDIED. A STANDARD BASAL READER APPROACH WAS USED WITH READING GROUPS DIVIDED BY SEX AS WELL AS ABILITY. PACE AND EMPHASIS OF INSTRUCTION FOR THE BOYS WAS ADAPTED TO SUIT THEIR NEEDS. A LINGUISTIC APPROACH ORGANIZED TO…

The liberty of deviation from the dominant word order in Esperanto and the natural languages is considered. Greenberg's classification of the languages according to four criteria, the liberty of word order in Sanskrit, and the norm of grammaticality in a constructed language are considered. Objection is made to St. Clair's argument that word order…

This paper presents a morphophonemic analysis of the characteristics that distinguish verb structure in New Mexican Spanish from that of Standard Spanish. Verb structure and classification are discussed, and verbs are analyzed as being composed of four components: stem, thematic vowel, tense-aspect, and person-number. Verbs are classified as…

This paper discusses findings from a study of the speech patterns of 10 mothers interacting with their own younger child, their own older child, and with an adult. Results are discussed in terms of the temporal-acoustic pattern and content of the mothers' speech. Two claims are made about the kinds of speech a child hears: (1) The flow of speech…

Discusses the signals that are used to create, sustain, and end conversational involvement in two different languages, with examples provided of paralinguistic attention getters, linguistic conversation initiation signals, "in-tune" signals, and "face-saving" signals from a study of English and Greek. (CB)