This paper traces the development of two roughly synonymous nominalizing suffixes during the Early Modern English period, the Romance "-ity" and the native "-ness." The aim is to assess whether these suffixes were favored in particular registers or followed similar paths of development, and to ascertain whether the ongoing…

The public's concern with the fate of the standard language has been well documented in the history of the complaint tradition. The print media have for centuries featured letters to the editor on questions of language use. This study examines a corpus of 258 language-related letters to the editor published in the English-speaking print media. By…

Newfoundland English has long been considered autonomous within the North American context. Sociolinguistic studies conducted over the past three decades, however, typically suggest cross-generational change in phonetic feature use, motivated by greater alignment with mainland Canadian English norms. The present study uses data spanning the past…

The influence of English on German has been an ongoing subject of intense popular and academic interest in the German sphere. In order to better understand this language contact situation, this research project investigates anglicisms--instances of English language material in a German language context--in the German hip hop community, where the…

Refers to "fine points" of Spanish usage. (SK)

A study examined the shift from standard spoken Japanese to dialect and compared it to the shift from formal to informal forms, within the context of several theories of code-switching and style-shifting. A five-minute segment was taken from a 30-minute conversation between three female native Japanese-speakers, all familiar with the Osaka…

A study of the spoken French of 120 residents of Montreal. The researchers were interested in the linguistic and social factors influencing the use of "avoir" and "etre." Results show that this usage corresponds to a tendancy to regularize conjugations. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Reports on a survey of how laypeople responded to errors in usage, their attitudes toward the acceptability of certain errors, and the values they placed on certain language styles. (RL)

This is a report on a study of the attitudes of French-speaking young people, aged 10 to 17 years, toward French as it is spoken in two sectors of Quebec City. One sector, Sainte-Foy, is mainly upper middle class; the other, Saint-Sauveur, is economically and socially disadvantaged. The research was carried out on the basis of work in French and…

This paper examines the language used by workers in a china factory in order to present the characteristics and underlying features of occupational jargon. The paper shows: (1) jargon is affected by regional-local pronunciation, grammatical expressions and lexical items, and by individual speech styles which result from general linguistic…

Discusses changes in the pronunciation of colloquial Brltish English, reflecting changing social attitudes toward traditional Received Pronunciation. Finds that a study is needed to determine a new standard for the use of future foreign students of English. A pilot study is described. (IFS/WGA) i

Discusses the relationship in language and specifically in French between the standard language norm, the various registers and styles available to native speakers of a given language, and second language learning. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Examines the nature of the convergent relationship between formal spoken and written discourse by focusing on three issues: (1) spoken vs. written modes; (2) formal vs. informal discourse; and (3) the relationship between oral ritual communication and written language and between ritual/written communication and everyday colloquial language. (SED)