Percentages of unexpected pronominal usage in Japanese are listed. Data was gathered from Japanese magazine articles concerning individuals. Tendencies rather than strict rules became evident. (SC)

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…

The existence of a "literary dialect" was postulated on several grounds, and specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. (HOD)

Discusses dislocation, a construction in which one element, usually a noun, is isolated either at the beginning or at the end of a sentence while being represented in the body of the sentence by a pronoun. Discusses the place of dislocation in linguistic studies and its pedagogical implications. (SED)

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

To explore the concept of lexical collocation, or relationships between words, a study was conducted based on three assumptions: (1) that a text structure for a unit of discourse was analogous to that existing at the level of the sentence, (2) that such a text form could be discovered if a large enough sample of generically similar texts was…

This article discusses the various styles of commercial correspondence in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

Coherence and cohesion are fundamental considerations of the composing process that help to define the global and local components of texuality. Global text coherence centers on those aspects of the familiar rhetorical situation. Coherence operates at the paragraph and essay levels, answering questions about focus, tone, mode, topic, and thesis.…

Right dislocations are expressions of the following form: (1) "They told the Grand Jury a number of lies, the Nixon men." (2) "We find we have to limit our social schedule, my husband and I." (3) "Mary always wears a frown, the ugly witch." They are found also almost exclusively in the spoken language. This paper…

John Searle's treatment of declarations in his (1976) classification of speech acts is examined. Some acts that are classified as declarations by that theorist, especially certain ones relating to religious rituals and literary usage, do not fit the definition of that class and should be reclassified, either in another one of Searle's classes…

Describes and examines the word choice and frequency in six tests and raises questions about the use of word lists and controlled vocabulary in producing basal readers, judging and manipulating readability of texts, and building vocabulary. (HOD)

The Spanish tense system was chosen as a starting point to establish the systematic character of the Spanish used in situations of intense code switching between Spanish and English. The tense system was chosen for two reasons: (1) the distinction among past tenses (in particular, the imperfect indicative vs. the preterite and the past continuous)…