How we talk about bilingualism has an effect on how others think about bilingual individuals, and in turn, how "active bilingual learners/users of English" (ABLE) students are assessed and taught in schools. I use a transdisciplinary approach of bridging social semiotics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics…

This dissertation investigates the interaction of developing extralinguistic cognitive systems with early language learning and processing through the case study of verb argument structure. The interaction of these systems with the linguistic system underpins fundamental theories of language learning and use: language does not exist in isolation.…

Registers are culturally recognized varieties of language that are associated with situations of use (Biber, Egbert, & Keller, 2020). Variation in frequencies of linguistic forms across registers is thought to be functional for the situations they are associated with; that is, certain language features are more common in one register than…

Anglicisms play a pivotal role in shaping media discourse in Kazakhstan, potentially influencing both the style and content of media texts. The communicative and pragmatic features of anglicisms in Kazakhstani news feeds, in addition, are deeply impacted by globalization. This research aims to analyze how anglicisms influence the perception and…

This article discusses sociolinguistically oriented research on second language acquisition (SLA) in the decade since Firth and Wagner (1997). Over the last 10 years, substantial progress has been made in developing a model of the sociolinguistic processes that inform second language acquisition. This model is supported by empirical evidence on…

Examines how one interprets and reacts to dirty-word descriptors. Subjects judged how much they would like a fictitious person described with dirty and non-dirty adjective pairs. Liking was influenced by: (1) semantic interpretation, (2) intrinsicalness of the adjective for the person described, and (3) contextual relations between speaker and…

A source of regularity in sentence construction is the recurrent use of certain fixed syntactic formats in explaining, describing, etc. Subjects exploit these regularities in sentence perception. An experiment on the perception of "perverse" sentences shows that listeners assimilate some of the features of sentences to "formulation frames."…

Challenges the hypothesis that different linguistic codes are specifically related to different social groups, observing that children's language usage shows qualitative differences determined by the situations they face rather than by their sociocultural background. Supports this observation with an analysis of children's attempts to explain the…

This paper is primarily concerned with Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic account of school failure. The first section describes some earlier work relevant to his theories. In the second section, Bernstein's sociolinguistic codes thesis is described, and an attempt is made to show that it suffers from the merging of two logically distinct strands…

Contrasts differences in language use across the Japanese workplace, including women's speech. Examines what is referred to as "manifestations of power" among Japanese working women. Explores "resistance to subordination" among female university students who have not yet entered professional or domestic life. Comparison of the…

Linguistic cues evoke prestructured beliefs in people's minds regarding the nature and causes of public problems. Political language can shape people's opinions and thereby shape events. There appear to be two beliefs or myths that people use to explain social problems: the first sees the sufferer as responsible for his own plight in a basically…

An examination of recent linguistic and sociolinguistic studies on bilingualism has resulted in a reappraisal of the notion of interference. The implications of this reappraisal lead to the conclusion that the principles of transformational generative grammar could successfully be applied to the study of bilingualism if the bilingual's mental…

Seven papers are provided. Mary Rainey's paper, "Style Switching in a Head Start Class," considers speech styles used in the classroom. "Language Acquisition in the Deaf: Some Suggestions for Inclusion in the Field Manual," by Carol Pfuderer, suggests areas of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research relevant to the exploration of deaf…