The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

A construction occurring in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is examined: NPi "call" NPi V"-ing", as in "the woman call herself working." First, a number of reasons that such a form might be overlooked or dismissed as an AAVE dialect form are outlined. Then the sociolinguistic method is applied to the…

Although Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather "free" word order compared to major western European languages, West Greenlandic (WG) has a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. It is argued that WG behaves more like Slavic languages. (Contains 36 references.) (LB)

A fundamental problem in the study of spontaneous speech is how to segment it for analysis. The segments should be relevant for the study of linguistic structures, speech planning, speech production, or communication strategies. Operational rules for segmentation should consider a wide variety of criteria and be hierarchically ordered. This is…