Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

In discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by Vietnamese learners of English: "She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest…

The study examined children's use of verbal -s marking (e.g., he "walks") in two nonmainstream dialects of English, African American English (AAE), and Southern White English (SWE). Verbal -s marking was of interest because there are gaps in the literature about the nature of this structure within and across typically developing children…

This dissertation examines the Imperfective aspectual system of urban Bahamian Creole English (BahE), a mesolectal creole spoken in The Bahamas. Specifically, following Comrie (1976) I examine three Imperfective aspectual categories in the creole--continuous progressiveness (variable auxiliary "be" use with V- "ing" verbs and…

This study, an outgrowth of the "Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada," based on atlas field records covering the entire Eastern United States, enables the author to trace the geographical spread and also the social distribution of the linguistic features that are treated. Research demonstrates how early culture centers and…

It is the intent of this Master's Thesis to describe the nonstandard morphology and syntax of a representative sample of children in the Norfolk City schools. The description is organized according to the linguistic patterning of nonstandard English features and their social and ethnic distribution. The speech of both white and Negro children is…

In this study, the use of the preposition "pour" (for) in Ontario French is analyzed: (1) in its use with the verb "payer" (to pay for), and (2) in its durative meaning. Data come from the written and spoken French of three groups of bilingual Franco-Ontarian students from the ninth and twelfth grade. In the written and spoken…

This description of Appalachian speech, derived from one part of the final report of a research project on Appalachian Dialects, is intended as a reference work for educators, particularly reading specialists, English teachers, language arts specialists, and speech pathologists. Chapters deal with the following main topics: (1) a sociolinguistic…

Using the case of a vernacular variety spoken on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, this article demonstrates how linguistic-systemic principles such as remorphologization, psycholinguistic principles of perceptual saliency, and sociolinguistic processes of symbolic identity converge to account for the development of leveling in this community.…

Discursive functions are seldom expressed in an absolutely neutral way. In most cases, various colorings - expressive, affective or social - are superimposed on the utterance by which a function is conveyed. In so far as these colorings are not random shades, but can be regarded as graded nuances within given ranges, selected in order to fit the…

Examines the process of consonant cluster reduction in the English of residents of a San Antonio, Texas, "barrio." The author compares Tejano patterns of "/-t,d/" deletion with the pan-English pattern. Results suggest a pattern of convergence and divergence. The study shows that Mexican American English exhibits regional and…

The papers in this volume represent revised versions of presentations made at the First Workshop on Yuman Languages held at the University of California, San Diego, June 17-21, 1975. The focus was on the area of syntax, where the least amount of published information had previously been available. Papers presented were: "Syntactic Diversity…

In a sociolinguistic study of the verb phrase in Southern White English, a pattern of change in progress was observed. The 14 variables studied showed that certain variants were increasing, others decreasing, and yet others stable across time within the community, and that each variable's change was progressing in a wave sensitive to age, social…

The paper examines interpretive aspects of English non-uniformity among fifth and sixth grade Native Americans at Laguna Elementary School, Laguna, New Mexico. Speaker assessments of instances of uninflected "be" are ordered to form an implicational scale. The variability in the students' assessment pattern is compared to previous inter-ethnic…

A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic…