While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity,…

Substitutes in English (such as "he,""she,""it,""one,""do so,""thus,""there," and "such") participate in an intricate network of systems. This study aims to identify those English substitutes which are words or word sequences and to describe their workings in some of…

Purpose: The current study focuses on describing the English language narrative skills of children who have been exposed to the Filipino language. Method: Eight children between the ages of 6;0 (years;months) and 7;7 who spoke primarily English but who were exposed to the Filipino language at home participated. Each child produced three narrative…

Papers on phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics from a conference on formal linguistics include: "Major Class Alternations" (Young-Mee Yu Cho, S. Inkelas); "On Defining Complex Templates (R. Kager); "Sandhi and Syllables in Classical Sanskrit" (B. Kessler); "Catalexis in Word Stress: Evidence from Spanish and…

This guide for teaching Tagalog as a second language is designed for training Peace Corps volunteers. It consists of 140 lessons based on cartoons from a Philippines newspaper. Each lesson contains a one- to three-panel cartoon in Tagalog with English translation, vocabulary and grammar notes, comprehension questions, and notes on related cultural…

This guide is designed for Tagalog language training of Peace Corps workers in the Philippines and reflects daily communication needs in that context. It consists of 21 learning modules to be used in independent study. Each module contains a list of the targeted language competencies and related phrases, a dialogue or text, vocabulary list,…

This volume is devoted to papers of an empirical or theoretical nature contributing to the study of language and communicative bahavior in the Philippines. Articles included are: (1) "Three Criteria for Establishing Dialect Boundries," by Michael Ross Walrod; (2) "Topic in Tagalog Revisited," by Teresita C. Rafael; (3)…

This paper focuses on the mechanism by which the successful learner acquires a second language. The author postulates a core language, the common core of the speaker's native and target languages, and states that the second language becomes an extension of this common core. Whatever language-specific features are added while acquiring the second…

This guide is designed for Tagalog language training of Peace Corps workers in the Philippines, and reflects daily communication needs in that context. It consists of: a quick reference to common expressions and phrases; a series of topical vocabulary and phrase lists; targeted core language competencies, at three proficiency levels; a…