This study investigated whether "avoidance" is an appropriate term to describe the linguistic behavior in which the learner with a particular first-language (L1) background tries to underproduce or underrepresent a particular second-language (L2) structure. The first section seeks to establish the general psycholinguistic principle that…

Communities of one sort or another are found in the literature of many disciplines and are used to explain any number of things: linguists examine language in terms of speech communities, while composition researchers write of discourse communities. Linguists have advanced various definitions of communities, but Stanley Fish's "Is There a…

A study of the functions and structure of referential third- person pronominal chains in spontaneous English conversation as compared to those in written English is discussed. The study found the frequencies of these pronouns and of their chains to be generally much higher in the spoken corpus than in the written corpus. In the spoken corpus,…

A discussion of what functional linguistic research can offer teachers of composition and English is presented in this paper, which provides examples of different levels of analysis (phonology, morphology, and syntax) for the language of a variety of populations (including traditional freshmen, basic writers, English as a second language (ESL)…

This book contains essays which focus on the systems of communication that operate within and between various social segments of Afro-American communities in the United States. The essays are presented under the following headings: (1) "Getting Into It: Black Talk, Black Life and the Academic," (2) "'Talking My Talk': Black Talk Varieties and…

Many black students speak a nonprestige dialect called black English, which places them at a disadvantage academically and socially. This monograph describes the features of black English, defines its use, discusses several theories of its origin, and offers some methods for teaching black students standard spoken usage as another style of speech.…

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A…

Criticism has been directed at a growing body of literature broadly referred to as ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, folk science, ethnographic semantics, and cognitive anthropology. Criticisms concern methodological and analytic aspects of ethnoscientific procedure, and the directions of ethnosemantic research from a theoretical point of view. The…

Research in a Puerto Rican community in New York City was undertaken to explore the language climate in that community, which included the linguistic forms in use, their distribution and functions in daily life, community members' attitudes toward language, and the way in which language phenomena are influenced by various social factors. An…

A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic…

This study of language development was intended to chart the developmental course of the spontaneous use of negatives and affirmatives by 1 1/2 - 3-year-olds in response to true or false statements concerning familiar objects, properties, and actions. Forty children, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age, were assessed for knowledge of the words used…

This study (partially supported by an ESEA Title III Grant) of the written composition of 190 above-average children in grades 3-6 was carried out to determine whether those children who were taught selected concepts of invention, arrangement, and style over a period of 8 months would demonstrate significant improvement in composition or sentence…

Based on transcribed conversations with black children in kindergarten and the intermediate grades, a study was devised to determine whether black urban children from lower socioeconomic areas speak a systematic, consistent form of nonstandard English, and if so, to provide a syntactical analysis of the dialect of nonstandard speakers. Speech…

This paper discusses the profession of teaching English as a second language. The problems encountered in classes taught by untrained amateurs are discussed, and the strategies of the professional teacher are outlined. She or he begins by finding out who the students are, what they need to know, and how they will have to use English. In this way,…

This study examines the usage of the auxiliaries "avoir" and "etre" in the passe compose and pluperfect. The study is primarily based on a sample of French written by agroup of grade 9 Franco-Ontarian pupils from the Sudbury region. The students' written French is shown to include a high proportion of cases where intransitive…