James P. Lantolf is George and Jane Greer Professor Emeritus of Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics and former director of the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics in the same academic unit at Xi'an Jiaotong…

Discusses findings which suggest that frequency adverbs do affect the perceived aggresiveness of sentences at most levels of verbal aggression. (MH)

Reported here is the work of two linguists, William Labov and Paul Cohen, and of two black researchers who know the culture of the inner city, Clarence Robins and John Lewis. Together they explore certain aspects of Black English vernacular (BEV) and certain political and cultural aspects of the black community. Part 1 (chapters 1-4) deals with…

The role of the particle "o.k." in service encounter dialogue is discussed. A service encounter is defined as a situation of interaction between a "posted" server and a second party (a customer) who invokes the server's participation as an operator of a "serving post." It is suggested that approval or acceptance is often only part of what is being…

Reviews the present status of the categories developed by the Writing Research Unit at the University of London for classifying discourse function. (HOD)

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…

The following essays on communication are presented: communication as a condition of survival, communication for special purposes, the means of transmission of communication, communication within social and economic structures, the teaching of communication through the press, the teaching of modern languages, communication as a point of departure,…

This research attempted to identify relationships that exist between linguistic factors and some nonlinguistic variables. Twenty principals provided 60 taped conversations with teachers and responded to questionnaires designed to elicit selected demographic data and measures of interpersonal needs along the dimensions of the Schutz FIRO-B…

The factors that are involved in the choice of address to women as compared to men by speakers of American English were investigated in public interactions regarding provision of a service. In addition to proper names, there are two major types of address forms in general usage: the traditional respect forms, such as "ma'am" and "sir," and the…

This bibliography lists approximately 200 books and articles on the subject of Black English for practical use by students interested in linguistic analysis and by educators. The listing is divided into seven sections: Linguistic Analysis--Linguistics and Culture; Lexicons, Word Lists, Glossaries; Vocabularies; Verbal Art; Nonverbal Communication;…

EMPHASIZING THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS, THIS BOOK DESCRIBES THE HISTORY, SCOPE, PROBLEMS, AND CURRENT STATE OF THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION IN THE UNITED STATES. THE MAJOR PORTION OF THE BOOK, DEVOTED TO LINGUISTIC SCIENCE, IS COMPRISED OF (1) EXPLANATIONS OF HOW LINGUISTIC SCIENCE COMPARES, FROM THE HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE POINTS OF…

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…