This study presents evidence collected from basilectal texts that the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) mental predicates "think, know, want, feel, say, see, hear" have clear lexical equivalents in Hawaii Creole English (HCE), and that these HCE predicates occur, with minor qualification, in the syntactic configurations predicted by…

Reports a study of two- and three-year-olds' acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that took a second verb in their complements. Complement types, complementizer connectives, and the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. (Author/CB)

Analysis of the discourse of eight- and nine-year-old children with emotional disturbances as compared with that of non-emotionally disturbed peers found significant differences between the groups. The analysis focused on mean length of utterances and discourse error patterns. (MSE)

A longitudinal study of four 17- to 33-month-olds revealed that their linguistic selection at the one-word stage was governed by principles of informativeness, while the two-word stage was characterized by new, or a combination of new and old, information. (Author/CB)

Analysis of the communicative setting of televised electoral debates in Israel focused on the stylistic features of the political candidates' discourse. The analysis identified and described such rhetorical strategies as figurative expressions and intensifiers, irony and rhetorical questions, repetition and parallelism, and meta-discoursive…

Patterns of use of the French particles "bon, (eh) ben, and enfin" were analyzed in a corpus of spontaneous multispeaker conversation. Results show that each particle marks a particular type of discontinuity in the discourse. Turn-initial and turn-medial patterns are described for each. (17 references) (Author/MSE)

Investigates the consequences of a contemporary natural experiment forced upon a lawyer who suffered a massive stroke and severe aphasia, losing almost completely the ability to speak meaningful language. With the help of therapists, he learned to speak three words. The author investigates how such coconstruction is accomplished. (41 references)…

Evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The results of a study show that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. (22 references) (GLR)

Focuses on generic discourse practices by tracing the persuasive heterogeneity and the distributed nature of discourse genres in use. Three examples from research are explored: a father and his two daughters playing a family-created verbal game; a family's engagement with their 2-year-old's creative retellings of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit"; and a…

Discussion of the multilingual mind's organization proposes the Least Expansion Hypothesis, that knowledge of any language is organized in the same cognitive manner. A slot is created for knowledge of each level of language, storing knowledge of all languages pertaining to that level. A new knowledge unit is entered only when differing…

Highlights how language of journalists and academics to describe children's experiences reflects and influences the position and rights accorded to children in the English-speaking world. Contends that children's low status is perpetuated through "textual abuse" in academic literature on children's rights. Maintains that children are…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are cultural differences in topic organization and role-related topic control in dinner conversations; such differences may function as a means for socialization into communicative styles. The research was designed as a comparative study of two geographically close but linguistically very…

A study used both a survey and observation to investigate the phenomenon of politer speech among Japanese women than among Japanese men. The survey of 256 men and 271 women, parents of college students at a college in Tokyo and representing a middle-class population, inquired about the respondents' personal use of polite forms of Japanese. It is…

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…