The core objective of this study was to examine whether acoustic variability of vowel production in American English, across speaking tasks, is systematic. Ten male speakers who spoke a relatively homogeneous Wisconsin dialect produced eight monophthong vowels (in hVd and CVC contexts) in four speaking tasks, including clear-speech, citation form,…

This dissertation presents a dialectological study of the city of Erie, Pennsylvania, and the neighboring towns in the boundary area between the North and Midland dialect regions. Erie occupies a unique place in the dialect geography of North America, in that it appears to have switched status from the North to the Midland. Since the dialect…

This paper suggests an explicit way of integrating sociolectal and dialectal facts in the overall description of a language. Phonetic, morphological, syntactic and semantic units of the whole language are defined. (CK)

Discusses the curriculum implications of recent research and linguistic theory on bidialectalism. (DD)

In standard American Spanish, the velar nasal surface variant of systematic /n/ occurs only in syllable-final environments, when the immediately following segment is a velar consonant. In many American Spanish dialects, however, "ng" may also optionally appear phonetically in other phonological environments. Cuban Spanish is such a…

A study investigated dialect change in a southern Netherlands city, where the dialect spoken is distant from Dutch in phonology, morphology, and lexicon. The dialect is commonly spoken in the city of Maastricht, and is not restricted to one social class. Subjects were 64 native inhabitants of Maastricht from three generations: older (over 55…

Discusses the theories of various linguists concerning variation and argues that genetically related languages and related dialects are manifestations of the same linguistic phenomenon. (PM)

Discusses some of the theoretical issues underlying the study of Chinese dialects, reviews the historical background within which the dialects were formed, and reviews some ongoing studies that appear promising for increasing understanding of how dialects are structured and how they are changing. (CB)

Fieldwork with a Hydaburg resident yielded this descriptive paper, which focuses on Haida syntax, and especially predication. The verbal word in Haida is of three distinct types--active, stative, and neutral--the first two of which may occur in either SOV or OSV word order. Neutral verbal words are relatively rare and take active pronouns plus a…

Most studies of dialects in English-language literature have focused on works of the nineteenth century or earlier. However, modern literature can expand the scope of dialectological investigation. In John Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," use of non-standard dialect forms occurs when the author uses an unusually informal register…

It has been reported (Terrell 1974) that in Cuban Spanish word-final /s/ aspiration is generally not affected by grammatical constraints, except for determiners in prevocalic environments. However, deletion of /s/, according to Terrell, is correlated with morphological classes and grammatical function, and is constrained by functional…

There are two facets to the lyric rhythm of Taiwanese folk songs: beat alignment and metrical pattern selection. Because the lyrics are metrically derived from classical Chinese verse, a prosodic line may have syllable-beat symmetry. However, syllable-beat mismatches are also common. Lexical syllables have preference over functor syllables in beat…

This volume consists of the following ten papers, which were presented at the second Hokan-Yuman Languages Workshop, held at the University of California at San Diego in June 1976: (1) "The Havasupai Writing System," by Rena Crook, Leanne Hinton, and Nancy Stenson; (2) "The Upland Yuman Numeral System," by Martha B. Kendall;…

This volume presents principles and models for describing language variation, and introduces a time-based, dynamic framework for linguistic description. The book first summarizes some of the problems of grammatical description encountered from Saussure through the present and then outlines possibilities for new descriptions of language which take…