Students' preferences are being shaped by what they view in advertisements. Hence, this study examined the occurrence of code-switching in Philippine TV advertisements. Particularly, it analyzed syntactic patterns of code-switching, pragmatic/discourse functions and motivations present in the code-switched ads aired from the country's giant TV…

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

Examines the conversation behavior of mothers toward their children with respect to two hypotheses: that the mothers' underlying interactional intent can be inferred from patterning in their conversation and that the utterances having a directive or controlling function will show a negative relationship to those designed to elicit conversation…

Every language has different systems for expressing third party information. While in some languages grammar rules stipulate how to do this, in both Japanese and English the degree of indirection or direction a speaker should use to express information obtained as hearsay is genuinely a pragmatic language issue. English speakers tend to express…

The use of rhetorical voice in literature and news reporting is examined and its implications for classroom study of literature are discussed. Analysis is based on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel and the definition of "voice" as an identifiable social role or position that a character enacts, and "ventriloquation" as the…

Analysis of the babbling of five infants indicated that between 14 and 40 percent of utterances recurred in particular contexts with a greater than expected frequency, suggesting that babbling is not entirely random but contains consistent sound-meaning relationships that are not adult-modeled. (Author/CB)

A collection of essays on aspects of pragmatics in non-Western cultures includes these papers: "Social Rank and Tunebo Requests" (Paul Headland); "The Use of Reported Speech in Saramaccan Discourse" (Naomi Glock); "An Analysis of Illocutionary Verbs in Walmatjari" (Joyce Hudson); "Please Be Specific: A Functional…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…

Discussion of one form of pragmatic competence, projecting a sense of stylistic voice into texts, explores how writing in a non-native language affects the ability to express stylistic voice and enter into social dialogue with readers. Using the published reflections of authors writing professionally in a non-native language, the analysis shows…

A comparative study of turn-taking in North American and Spanish conversation investigated (1) differences in styles for the two cultures and (2) any resulting misinterpretation of communicative intentions. Data for the first were drawn from two dinner parties, one with four American women, conducted in English, and one with four Spanish-speaking…

Transferred epithets, adjectives that appear to have been transferred from adverb to prenominal position (e.g., "I balanced a thoughtful lump of sugar..."), have been viewed as unanalyzable both grammatically and from the viewpoint of transformational derivation. However, another explanation is that these combinations show patterns…

A study investigated differences in the speech styles used in making requests among five native speakers of Japanese (JJ), five American learners of Japanese (AJ), and Americans speaking English (AE) and their implications for intercultural communication. All subjects were adults. Data were elicited in role-plays of a scenario including the…

Papers from the linguistics colloquium address a variety of topics in linguistic theory and language research, most in French. Topics include: objectivity and subjectivity in understanding language; focalization in conversational language; the notion of "popular etymology"; serial construction in Malagasy; linguistic competence (in German);…

This study reports on an analysis of questions which were used in the pursuit of understanding in three focussed discussions, two by native speakers (NSs) and one by non-native speakers (NNs). Twelve adult subjects, four NNs and eight NSs, were used. In 66 minutes, only 30 questions were used for the purpose of pursuing understanding. These…

A role-playing procedure for elicitation of speech acts was designed to study aspects of the communicative competence of second language learners, namely, their language variation with respect to deference when the age and sex of the addressee are systematically manipulated. Sixteen Spanish-speaking adult learners of English as a second language…