Focuses upon the importance of understanding the consequences of the "myth, masking, and mode" in guiding the language development of black disadvantaged children; based upon a paper presented before the Niagara Linguistic Frontier. (RD)

Examines viewers' perceptions of characters and their speech to see if: (1) the language of the characters corresponds to the language of Black speech communities as described by sociolinguists; (2) White viewers perceive language as important in their perceptions of the characters; and (3) White viewers are more likely to identify with speakers…

The bicultural and bilingual family patterns and language acquisition patterns of 24 upper middle class children of foreign-born Chinese parents are outlined. Findings suggest two bilingual development patterns, one for children born in Canada or immigrating before school age, and the other for those immigrating during school years. (MSE)

The study discusses the position of the protolanguage in the hierarchy formed by idiolect, dialect, and diasystem. The article emphasizes that linguistic study contains a great many diachronic events and hypothesized synchronic features that are implausible, yet possible. (30 references) (CK)

This study presents evidence collected from basilectal texts that the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) mental predicates "think, know, want, feel, say, see, hear" have clear lexical equivalents in Hawaii Creole English (HCE), and that these HCE predicates occur, with minor qualification, in the syntactic configurations predicted by…

Describes a morphosyntactic feature of the Xining dialect that is unique among all Chinese dialects: that is, the use of a preposition to express ablative nominal relationships. (Author/VWL)

The text covers the phonology and grammar of the variety of Inupiaq, an Eskimo language, spoken in northwestern Alaska. A introductory section explains and maps the geographic distribution of Inupiaq dialects. Subsequent chapters address these topics: pronunciation; phonological processes in Inupiaq; Inupiaq morphology; intransitive verbs;…

The linguistic situation in Ireland over the last few centuries is examined from the rise of Irish dialects of English to the present. Four aspects of this history are examined: factors affecting the emergence of Hiberno-English dialects beginning in the seventeenth century, including opportunity for learning English, patterns in literacy and…

Many tone languages exhibit some form of downdrift or automatic downstep, the lowering of high tones separated by low tones. In extreme cases, the realization of high tones at the end of a domain (such as the sentence) may be lower than the realization of low tones at the beginning. Tone languages with this property are cross-level tone languages.…

The teacher of black students needs to develop a sensitivity to their rich communicative language styles in order to use the varied styles in the classroom situation. (JH)

A technique for decreasing interference between black dialect features and the hearing and production of standard English is described. (JH)

Legal language is discussed in the context of concern about the comprehensibility of consumer documents and the trend toward simplification of the language used in these documents. Specific features of legal language and its functions within the legal community and society are identified. As a primary tool of the legal profession, legal language…

A dialect of Rato-Romansh spoken in a Swiss town is examined in the context of lexical phonology. The structure of this dialect's lexicon consists of two levels defined by stress assignment, not cyclically in this case but at the end of each level. Other considerations that have been advanced as bases for level division within the lexicon, such as…

This reference grammar is a description of the speech of educated people of the Bangalore/Mysore area of Karnataka State in South India. This particular dialect is used in films and, to some extent, on the radio. The four sections of the book deal with: (1) phonology, (2) the noun phrase, (3) the verb phrase, and (4) syntax. Each item that is…