Suggests that good business writing is dependent on solving the problem of the best psychological approach to readers, organization, writing style, and English usage. (MH)

Advocates abandoning the all too common practice of requiring the mastery of standard English as a prerequisite for learning. (JT)

Shows that the English names of meals are variously applied, according to geographical area and social class, as well as working hours and personal habits. (IFS/WGA)

Presents 41 German words and phrases that are used in Spanish today. Definitions are provided and examples of their use in Spanish texts are given. (NCR)

Outlines a model for teaching French whose goal is to approximate actual language behavior as opposed to the artificial models usually provided in textbooks. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Discusses the dilemma that language variation studies have caused concerning the choice of language variety to be used in language instruction, and outlines a taxinomic model for looking at language variation (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Analyzes the actual knowledge of French of Arabic-speaking and Portuguese immigrants with particular emphasis on their use of French verbs. The aim is to better prepare a methodology for the teaching of standard French to these workers. (Text is in French.) (TL)

An attempt to apply Blom's and Gumperz' model of code-switching to a small Swedish community in northern Sweden, Burtrask. The informants spoke standard Swedish, the Burtrask dialect, and a third variety which was a combination of the two. (CFM)

Colloquial Singapore English is an outer circle variety that exhibits contact induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, the authors address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the…

This contribution investigates the frequency patterns of the modal verbs as they occur in the one-million-word corpus of Cameroon written English. An analysis of dominant senses of some of the modals is also attempted. I have used results and statistical figures from British and American English (as reported in studies such as Biber et al. 1999…

Choice of second-person pronouns can help explain the intersection of language, personality, and culture. Changes in modern Norway are described in which the polite forms "de,""dem"/"dykk," and "deres"/"dykkar" have been replaced in all except commercial, government, or ultra-polite speech by the…

Many current French textbooks and teaching plans (in Germany) cling to obsolete usages and forms (e.g., imperfect subjunctive), as "bon usage," and to "educated" pronunciation. Teachers should teach living, present-day French, rather than the available teaching material. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

Six propositions express central and crucial functions of language. Knowledge of these concepts constitutes language awareness, and they should therefore be used as a basis for designing language awareness curricula. They are that: (1) each individual has the ability to produce an unlimited number of different utterances from the limited…

A careful study of second language varieties (SLVs) of English, which have not yet entered the mainstream of sociolinguistic research because of neglect and misunderstanding, shows that they are qualitatively different from the categories recognized in current sociolinguistic typology. SLVs provide some of the clearest evidence of sociocultural…