Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

This analysis concentrates on stokavic texts up to 1600, and attempts to explain the transposition of pronominal and verbal enclitics in this dialect. (CK)

The articles presented in this study represent four of the seven Nahuatl dialects in which the Summer Institute of Linguistics workers are currently involved. Tentative conclusions from the dialect testing teams engaged in measuring degree of intelligibility between Nahuatl dialects suggest that almost a dozen mutually unintelligible Nahuatl areas…

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…

This study of certain phonological and morphological aspects of the Negro speech of Memphis, Tennessee, is a revision of the author's 1961 Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Michigan. Twenty-four informants, all but one of whom were native Memphians, were used for the study; they were classed according to education and age. The interview…

Research supported in part by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. (RS)

Describes the use of negation in three corpora representative of early to mid-19th-century African American English. The study examines the negative form "ain't," negative concord to indefinites and verbs, negative inversion and negative postposing. Findings reveal that the negation system of early African American English derived…

This study of the Tirunelveli Tamil dialect is part of the outcome of the Linguistic Survey of Tamilnadu project undertaken by the Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics, Annamali University. The purpose underlying the study is to help the preparation of linguistic geography first for South Tamilnadu and then for the whole of Tamilnadu. The study…

In this preliminary report the authors compare a part of the phonological systems of Akuapem, Asante, and Fante--the major dialects of Akan. The comparison reveals the features common to all three dialects as well as the features which distinguish the dialects from one another. The description of the phonological systems of these dialects is…

Argues that forms represented orthographically as "wanna,""hafta,""gonna,""gotta,""usta," and "sposta" are linked to "want to,""have to," for example, by derivational morphology. Also argues that these to-derivatives inflect on their heads, not their edges, and that they are synonymous with their bases but have different subcategories and more…

Using the case of a vernacular variety spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, this article demonstrates how linguistic-systemic principles such as remorphologization, psycholinguistic principles of perceptual saliency, and sociolinguistic processes of symbolic identity converge to account for the development of leveling in this community.…