An examination of linguists' attempts to characterize the variety of English used in various articles and novels found that, although they used different criteria for classification, the linguists almost equally (about 30 percent of the time each) either could not identify, correctly identified, or incorrectly identified the variety. (14…

Presents a systematic comparison of the function of voice alterations in three genetically unrelated languages--Biblical Hebrew, Chinese, and English. It is shown that passive or passivelike function can be divided into a number of discrete functional types, each of which is associated with a certain combination of translation equivalents in the…

An analytic sketch of motion/location in more primitive spatio-temporal terms is presented. The earlier account (ED 096 825), showing various languages' most characteristic pattern for deriving a putatively-universal underlying representation of motion and location, is continued. The English pattern is characterized further (amplified by data from…

Presents an analysis of code switching that relies on general principles of phrase structure and rejects constraints specific to code switching. This model is shown to account for intersentential switches between typologically different languages such as Farsi and English, including within word switches and switches between modifiers and nouns.…

Six papers dealing with crosslinguistic generalizations are summarized and discussed here. Two of them were about question structure: "Language Universals and Sociocultural Implications in Deviant Usage: Personal Questions in Swedish" by C. Paulston and "Valley Zapotec: Identical Rule for Both wh Question Movement and Relative Clause Constituent…

Investigated whether topic-prominence transfer is a universal developmental stage or a transferable typology by analyzing the behavior of 46 native speakers of English learning Chinese, a subject-prominence (SP) language, as a second language. Results found that the learners displayed a process of systematically transferring English SP features to…

The following conference papers are included here: (1) "Language Typology and Contrastive Linguistics," by Laszlo Dezso and William Nemser, summarizes the history of typology and discusses the application of typology to research on language acquisition. (2) "Contrastive Aspects of British and American English with Implications for…

Contrastive analysis is suggested as a tool in language teaching for such areas as: (1) deciding how much to focus on different aspects of the target language; (2) making generalizations about its structure; and (3) explaining texts or constructions which might otherwise be incomprehensible. The claim is made that such procedures need to be based…

Two monographs are included in this volume--Enkvist's "On Defining Style, an Essay in Applied Linguistics," and Spencer and Gregory's "An Approach to the Study of Style." The first monograph discusses the history of stylistics (linguistic and literary), different approaches to the problem of definition of style theory, and offers some remarks on…

This work reports on an initial study of the possibility of providing a suitable framework for the teaching of a foreign language grammar through string analysis, using French as the target language. Analysis of a string word list (word-class sequences) yields an overall view of the grammar. Details are furnished in a set of restrictions which…