In "The New Language of the Old West," "Deadwood"'s creator and executive producer David Milch offers an extended exposition of the television show's language: "Language--both obscene and complicated--was one of the few resources of society that was available to these people.... It's very well documented that the obscenity…

Earlier sociolinguistic studies distinguish between Standard English and Black English with respect to indirect question formation. Standard English typically does not invert the tense-marker "do" in the imbedded question ("Ask John if he played basketball today") while Black English does ("Ask John did he play basketball today"). In fact, the…

During the past fifteen years, a variety of linguistic analyses of the tense and aspect systems of dialects of English has been conducted. These analyses were bounded by several analytic dimensions. This paper treats three of these dimensions and discusses their interrelationships and implications in relation to two dialects--Black English and…

The syntactical speech characteristics of black children living in depressed areas of an Eastern city were compared with the eight identified by Baratz, i.e., absence of "s" in the third person singular, zero copula, double negation and "ain't," zero past marker, zero possessive marker, zero plural marker, the substitution of "did" or "can" for…

This paper is divided into the following five sections, each of which considers an aspect of teaching grammar: the importance of teaching English grammar, teaching the patterns of words and sentences, the functions of words, making sentences, and a curriculum proposal for teaching standard English in the elementary grades through high school. (LL)

This study was based on a modification and extension of Greene's (1969) test wherein children choose structurally-transformed sentences which are synonymous with key sentences, thereby indicating recognition of the transformational relationships involved and internalization of those transformations. A similar test was devised to investigate the…

Designed for the individualized instruction of non-mainstream (non-standard) dialect bearing students from middle school through secondary, this instructional packet attempts to develop flexibility in language whereby the dialect bearer will be able to assimilate the mainstream (standard) forms and phonology into his own idiolect without…

The competence of school-aged, black children in standard English (SE) grammatical forms, specifically, six verb structures that distinguish Black English from SE, is the focus of this study. The subjects were 198 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade black children who attend four Title I schools in the New York City metropolitan area.…

This paper investigates the second language acquisition of interrogative-word questions in English. It is shown that the data from some bilingual English speakers at Pan American University are comparable to the data noted by others for both second and first language acquisition of interrogative word questions. In particular, interrogative-word…

This study examines the usage of preposition "pour" in the written and spoken French of two groups of Grade 9 and 12 Franco-Ontarian bilingual students from Welland and from the Sudbury area. Both the students' written and spoken French are shown to include a substantial proportion of constructions with "pour" which deviate…

This memorandum is the third in a series of publications which will ultimately combine to form the basis of a "Syllabus for the Training of Teachers of Standard English as a Second Dialect." Most of the culturally and economically disadvantaged are not native speakers of standard English, but speakers of a nonstandard dialect. The syllabus is…

LANGUAGE SAMPLES OF 20 NEGRO HEAD START CHILDREN IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WERE ANALYZED USING LEE'S (1966) DEVELOPMENTAL SENTENCE TYPES MODEL. THE TRANSFORMATIONS AND RESTRICTED FORMS OF THESE CHILDREN WERE THEN COMPARED WITH THE RESULTS THAT MENYUK (1964) OBTAINED FOR MIDDLE CLASS PRESCHOOLERS. RESULTS INDICATE THAT THE ECONOMICALLY DEPRIVED CHILD IS…