Reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Patterns of language use are reviewed and the role of demographic information in judgments is examined. (29 references) (GLR)

An analysis of the polysemic nature of prepositions in pidgins and creoles (PCs) looks at the analytic nature of PCs and the pervasive variability in their grammars, and then focuses on usage of the preposition "fo" in Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP), likely borrowed from the English "for." It is argued that while this is not the…

The underlying assumptions of the study described in this report are that language change in process is revealed through language variation and that variation is rarely random. With these two ideas in mind, the author studies the presence of "r" in Hawaiian English and considers its appearance in various environments. The study also…

Papers from the conference on the occurrence of verbal constituents in series in certain languages, particularly pidgins and creoles, include the following: "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Serial Verbs?" (Arnold M. Zwicky); "Serial Verb Constructions" (Pieter Seuren); "On the Definition and Distribution of…

Fifty-nine papers on language research and linguistic theory from the annual forum address these topics: correctness in language; aspects of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics; historical linguistics and language evolution; linguistic philosophy; aspects of syntax; aspects of discourse analysis; lexicon and semantics; language contact and…

Papers from a 1993 conference on linguistics, all in French, include essays on the following: Yoruba morphophonology; literary Arabic morphophonology; grammatical cohesion in Burushaski; phonological and lexical variation in French Canadian dialects, including Acadian; insults in Madrid Spanish; discourse analysis; maintenance of meaning in…