The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of Mandarin relative clauses (RCs), including the distributional pattern of different RC types in adult child-directed speech (study 1) and four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of different RC types (study 2). An RC is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun and is embedded within a…

Describes the International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program (ICECUP), a computer-based text retrieval program designed to search a tagged corpus for words, word elements, and their grammatical roles. Explains the search, display options, concordance, and subcorpus selection features of the ICECUP program. (MDM)

Describes the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), a project at the University of Louvain in Belgium that collects written work from, and analyzes the usage of, advanced adult English as a Foreign Language learners. Recurring combinations and concordances in ICLE are examined. (Contains five references.) (MDM)

This final report of a study which developed a working corpus of spoken and written Portuguese from which syntactical studies could be conducted includes computer-processed data on which the findings and analysis are based. A data base, obtained by taping some 487 conversations between Brazil and the United States, serves as the corpus from which…

Develops analytical techniques to determine "borrowability," the ease with which a lexical item or category of lexical items can be borrowed by one language from another. These techniques are then applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts. (29 references) (MDM)

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

The value and role of concordancers (simple computer programs that can quickly analyze electronic texts to find occurrences of a given word, part of a word, or phrase and display it within its immediate context) in secondary school English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching are examined. First, their use in higher education is discussed,…