The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker…

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern…

The main aim of this paper is to examine the syntactic status of a selected text-corpus focus, with a special focus on the verb within its Verb-Phrase. The major claim is that the power of the verb in its VP is loaded syntactically through which the speaker's desire of the doublespeak within X-Phemism is achieved. In order to fulfill this claim, a…

Aboriginal English, the language many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students bring to the classroom, represents the introduction of significant change into the English language. It is the argument of this paper that the linguistic, social and cultural facts associated with the distinctiveness of Aboriginal English need to be taken into…

This study attempts to describe the usage of English articles not, as in many past studies, using a mixture of lexical, contextual, rhetorical and structural considerations, but rather from a purely structural viewpoint alone. For the purposes of the study zero (0) and unstressed "some" are considered as articles as well as…

Asserts that any complete analysis of English must recognize the fact that "do and "be may co-occur in other than imperative sentences. (FWB)

Conclusion of a two-part article on the verb in English. Reprinted from Belgian journal Equivalences,'' n1 1972. (DS)

The underlying thesis of this article is that Nonstandard Negro English differs in its deep structure from Standard English. (Author/FWB)

Examines the distinctive dialect of the British royal family, as well as the "advanced" Received Pronunciation (RP) of the British upper class. Particular focus is on usages, such as the royal "we" and "one," as well as intergenerational differences among RP speakers. (Contains 21 references.) (MDM)

Describes a study which addressed three questions: (1) Do Hawaiian-English children have the same general ability to understand connected discourse as their standard English-speaking peers? (2) Do they have more difficulty understanding standard English than their own dialect? and (3) Can they more easily understand standard English by making…

The distinction between formal and casual English as reflected in the lexicon, in phonology, and in syntax is studied. Formality is treated as separate from other categorizations of language such as geographical origin of the speaker, social class of the participants, or specific context of discourse. The study was restricted mainly to the use of…

Current research in linguistic typology shows some syntactic processes, such as rightward dislocation of modifiers, to be characteristic of certain types of languages, and that a language of that type without such processes is "unnatural" and likely to develop them. For instance, almost all languages with order Verb-Object (VO) have dislocation…

The inventory presented here was produced by listing 13 sentence elements (subject, object, etc.) with specifications as to mutual exclusiveness and then presenting them to a computer with a request for permutations. Those items for which no examples could be found were excluded from the output, and the remaining patterns constitute the inventory…

Analyzed the spoken and written language of Caribbean college students who consider themselves to be native speakers of English. Discusses the students' linguistic self-perception as well as the morphosyntactic and discourse features that emerge when they write in standard English. The study suggests that anglophone Caribbean students should be…

More than 250,000 of Fiji's citizens are descendants of Indian indentured laborers of diverse origins. There are still distinct social groups based on language, religion, and place of origin. However, nearly all Fiji Indians speak one language called Fiji Hindustani. Other languages, such as Gujarati, Panjabi, Tamil, and Telugu, are still spoken,…