Efforts to simplify language used in consumer documents come from the consumer movement and a public disillusioned with big business and government. Even before President Carter's 1978 executive order mandating simplification in government regulations, some agencies were revising regulations for clarity. However, these efforts were based on too…

The first part of this essay argues specifically that legal speech acts are not statements but question/answer constructions. The focus in this section is on the underlying interrogative structure of the legal decision. The second part of the paper touches on significant topics related to the concept of legal speech acts, including the philosophic…

An experiment was conducted to investigate the hypothesis that English cliches reflect sex-specific styles of speech and that sex-specificity of expressions is related to differential usage by male and female speakers. Hypotheses were derived from Tyler's claims that the "neutral sphere" is infused by the male style, rendering it an inhibiting…

The initial stage of second language learning usually aims to develop the ability to converse. This conversational ability is, however, rarely the ultimate object of second language instruction. The student may want access to the literature of the culture of the second language, or to get an education in it. For these reasons, interest shifts…

Americans tend to derive nicknames and more intimate affectionate nicknames from a person's formal first name; the type of name used depends on the social situation and the relationship between the two people. In many cases, for both masculine and feminine names, the nickname is derived from the first (or sometimes the second) syllable of the…

This book is based on the York Computer Inventory of Prose Style, which seeks to provide a quantitative description of the syntactic characteristics of the literary language of specific authors over the last 400 years. After a brief theoretical introduction and a description of texts and sampling procedures, the discussion turns to specific…

Due to the deviance in language and the ideational fusion characteristic of poetry, the reader is engaged in a specialized form of information processing differing markedly from the reading of prose. Understanding occurs when the reader restructures his concept of reality to conform to that of the poem. (Author/SJL)

Analysis of two- to five-year-olds' (N=26) responses to queries regarding utterances they made during free play indicated that social context interacted with response type, demonstrating that the initial utterance had a role in response determination and was important to the contingent query sequence. (Author/CB)

This article discusses the various styles of commercial correspondence in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Special issue on "Changing Linguistics." (DD)

The linguistic compatibility between black students and white counselors in counseling sessions was found to be low. (Author)

Part 1 of this article appears in Zielsprache Deutsch", n1 1970. (RS)

Portion of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German, Los Angeles, California, November 1970. (WB)