This book is a selected distillation of linguistic scholarship which describes from both a historical (diachronic) and a contemporary (synchronic) viewpoint that conglomerate set of dialects and idiolects called English. The emphasis is on contemporary American English. But foreign language examples are also given in an attempt to demonstrate the…

This study, consisting of two experiments, investigated the role of verb information in resolving ambiguous noun phrases (NPs) in reading comprehension. Both experiments extended earlier studies. The first measured and compared reading time for sentences containing temporarily ambiguous subject complements and unambiguous complements, which were…

Educational programs for teachers of English as a Second Language must devote more attention to differences between the standard varieties of American and British English, with instruction focusing on the major orthographic, morphological, syntactic, collocational, and lexical differences. (CB)

A study investigated how repetition was used in the telling of personal narratives to create emotional involvement on the part of listeners, to evaluate stories, to prevent listeners from asking questions and from losing the story's focus, and to justify narrating that particular story in a cross-cultural setting. It was assumed that narrators…