Examines the representation of women in the language of important public communication events such as formal public speeches delivered by male political candidates. (MH)

Focuses on the increasing use of the so-called stative verbs found in the progressive aspect from the perspective of the nonnative speaker of English. The use of stative verbs in the progressive is a predictable consequence of the meaning of the present progressive and the particular discourse contexts in which progressive statives are found.…

This study focuses on a particular listening pattern in Japanese which occurs by overlapping with the current speaker's incrementing utterance. Applying the Conversational Analysis approach to conversational data, the study delineates how native speakers utilize overlapping listener responses to indicate their strong alignment, and why learners of…

A critic of Deborah Tannen's book "Gender and Discourse" responds to comments made about her critique, arguing that the book's analysis of the relationship of gender and discourse tends to seek, and perhaps force, explanations only in those terms. Another linguist's analysis of similar phenomena is found to be more rigorous. (MSE)

Investigated the second-language acquisition of English noun phrases in discourse, examining the effect of discourse markedness and structural markedness on the development of the noun phrase. It was found that second language learners distinguish between discourse contexts, acquiring more targetlike forms in the least marked context and least…

A study examines the way in which one group of discourse connectors, terminators, function in contemporary spoken French. Three types of terminators, elements used at the end of an utterance or section to indicate its completion, are investigated, including utterance terminators, interrogative tags, and terminal tags. (Author/MSE)

A longitudinal study of twenty-four (24) Hebrew-speaking mother-infant dyads during discussions of recent events indicated that mothers commented on a small set of events and tended to mark events with exclamations or formulaic expressions that gradually progressed to a true description of events as the children got older. (Author/CB)

Analyzes patterns of laughter in bookshop service encounters in England and Italy. Finds that in the English corpus, laughter is recurrently turn-initial, anticipating an account by the assistant in the same turn, whereas in the Italian corpus it is recurrently turn-final, leaving to the customer the possibility of eliciting an account and/or an…

Studies the efficacy of E-Prime (a form of English that eliminates all forms of the verb "to be") by looking at copula deletion and "flaming" by 214 users of electronic mail. Concludes that no relationship exists between copula deletion and flaming, which does not support the use of E-Prime. (HB)

Discusses some of the characteristics of the English language and also some of the pitfalls. Provides a list of writers' tips that are geared toward improving various aspects of writing. (HB)

Argues that "E-Prime" (a form of English that eliminates all forms of the verb "to be") should not be woven directly into the fabric of today's system of English education. Reacts to arguments for E-Prime as espoused by David Bourland and states a case against E-Prime. (HB)

Examined the spontaneous speech of four children and their parents for use of determiners with NP-type nouns and count nouns. Found that the parents made a clear distinction between the two kinds of nouns, omitting determiners with the NP-type nouns but not with the count nouns. The children all made the same distinction by four years of age. (HTH)

The growing presence of children of immigrant families in the public school system in the bilingual region of Catalonia provides us with an opportunity to study how young multilingual and multicultural speakers construct their social competencies and their identity within the specific context of a gate-keeping social institution such as the…

A study investigated properties of children's naturally occurring arguments. The arguments were sampled from transcripts of 20 discussions held in 4 fourth-grade classrooms. The principal findings were that children's arguments are filled with seemingly vague referring expressions; that the arguments sometimes do not contain explicit conclusions;…

Sociopragmatic ambiguity (SPA) is claimed here to differ from other, better-known types of ambiguity, in terms of its locus, cause, and effect. SPA is characteristic of whole-discourse features rather than of lexical items or phrases. The ambiguity is one of social rather than ideational or semantic meaning. It is claimed that SPA arises through…