The major purpose of this paper is to initiate discussion on the validity of systematic phonemics in the area of language acquisition. This is not an attempt to write a phonology, but rather an outline of some theoretical and formal devices that may be used for gaining insight into the phonological system of the child. An evaluation procedure…

Deliberately pedagogical in its orientation, this book presents the essentials of English structure in a framework derived from modern linguistic theory and in a way that should be comprehensible to beginning students. The book is intended to offer students an understanding of what is involved in the scholarly study of language as they acquire an…

The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far…

This study explores sound-symbolic, or mimetic, words in the Japanese language, the majority of which are never entered in Japanese dictionaries, and which may not be fully understood in all their nuances by native speakers. The extensiveness of the sound-symbolic system is related to the semantic under-differentiation of Japanese verbs. An…

The dictionary of the Ojibwa or Chippewa language represents the speech of the Mille Lacs Band of Minnesota and contains over 7,000 Ojibwa terms. Each entry gives information on the word stem, grammatical classification, English gloss, form variations, and references to alternate forms. An introductory section describes the entry format and use,…

An analysis of the Dinka (Sudan) vowel system consists of: (1) an overview of Dinka phonological structure, including the phonological sentence, the phonological word, the syllable, and the consonantal and vocalic features of the sound system; (2) an examination of breathy versus nonbreathy vowels, including a review of previous research using a…

Articles included in this compilation represent functional approaches to literary analysis. Most of these papers were presented at the Sixteenth International Systemics Congress held in Helsinki, Finland, in 1989. The aim of the congress was to establish dialogue between various functional approaches to the theoretical study of language, to…

A descriptive introduction to the Vietnamese language is presented. An introductory chapter gives an overview of the population using Vietnamese, its affiliation with Chinese and other languages, dialects, role in religion, history, writing systems, syllabic structure, and body language. Chapter 2 describes its sound system, syllable boundaries,…

Essays on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) include: an introduction to the evolution of AAVE within the African American diaspora (Shana Poplack); "Rephrasing the Copula: Contraction and Zero in Early African American English" (James A. Walker); "Reconstructing the Source of Early African American English…

This updated and expanded version of a 1991 book provides an account of the development of Spanish over the last 2,000 years. The six chapters include: (1) "Introduction" (e.g., Indo-European, Latin, and Romance); (2) "Phonology" (phonological change, transmission, suprasegmental features, development of the vowel system, development of the…

The collection of essays on the properties of Slavic languages in the context of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) includes: "Typological Similarities in HPSG" (Tania Avgustinova, Wojciech Skut, Hans Uszkoreit); "Auxiliaries, Verbs and Complementizers in Polish" (Robert D. Borsley); "An Architecture…

The dictionary of stems, roots, and affixes for the Blackfoot language provides, for each entry, information on the item's morphological type (e.g., noun stem, verb stem, root), subclassification if relevant, English index, and certain diagnostic inflectional forms (full words or sentences), each with an English translation. In addition, entries…

The first complete descriptive grammar of Lillooet, an interior Salish language spoken in British Columbia (Canada), uses the structuralist method to provide a detailed analysis of the language's sound system, word structure, and syntax, and to explain their functions and positions within Lillooet's overall linguistic structure. The account is…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…

This book reports the proceedings of the conference on the role of speech in language, the fifth conference in the "Communicating by Language" Series, sponsored by the Growth and Development Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The focus of the first group of papers is on the development of speech in man and…