In dealing with the differences between the school and non-school language of Black children, the author uses a contingency grammar," which considers all speakers of a language to have the identical linguistics competence but includes a level of systematic performance" to account for dialectal and other systematic differences. (FB)

Research by Martin Joos and John J. Gumperz to develop a perspective for rhetorical analysis. Carter's final remarks in his Playboy interview are shown to reflect an ineffective sociolinguistic code shift to a stylistic level inappropriate to Carter as public personality and as presidential candidate. (JF)

The premise that diglossamania, which is a pressure for second language learners to produce in English the equivalent style of the mother tongue, and which in turn leads to an artificial style, is discussed. (HP)

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…

The specific concern in this study is to consider the nature, social significance, and consequences of syntactic variation in the question forms used by judges when taking guilty pleas from criminal defendents. Nine judges from a court of general jurisdiction in Arizona were observed and tape-recorded while presiding over several procedures that…

A brief study of terms of address and reference in three examples of regional French of the departments of Sarthe and Mayenne. The questions raised in the study deal with ethnology, ethnolinguistics, popular or familiar French and traits of spoken French. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

A discussion of syntax and different kinds of expression based on discourse analysis of children aged ten to twelve. The extent to which linguistic structures and syntax are determined by the type of language usage and expression is studied. (Text is in French.) (AMH)

Investigates the hypothesis that letters to lower-status recipients would consist of a greater number of more familiar modes than letters to higher-status recipients and that letters to recipients of high solidarity with the writer would consist of a greater number of more familiar modes than letters to recipients of low solidarity with the…

A data-based study done in Philadelphia examined the constraints on relative pronoun deletion and looked for a possible correlation to social stratification or stylistic variation. Restrictive relative clauses only are examined. Constraints appear to be due to performance factors related to sentence processing. (SCC)

The nature of linguistic variation is examined, particularly the ways in which phonology, morphology, syntax, and other aspects of language vary according to social and situational contexts. A distinction must be made between a difference in frequency of a linguistic variable that carries meaning, and a difference in frequency which carries no…

African Wolof society is divided into a number of ranked status groups or castes, the largest of which is the high-ranking noble caste. Wolof conceive of two styles of speaking, the restrained or noble-like and the elaborated or "griot"-like, and the two styles are connected by the presence or absence of "kerse," honor and self-control. The…

This paper presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the historical present tense (HP) in English. The tokens of HP in narrative clauses, such as "he's smiling, an' he picks up the card," are referentially equivalent to their past tense alternants in the phrases, "he was smiling an' he picked up the card." Previous…

This study is divided into two sections: the first examines Standard French indirect interrogation, noting several distinct verb classes which are discussed in terms of permutations of WH-words, reduction, multiple WH-words, cleavage, semantic compatibility, and the "que-" completive; the second part focuses on indirect interrogation and…

This book combines a traditional history-of-the-language approach with modern linguistic analysis to discuss the history of English from Old English through Middle English, Early Modern English, Authoritarian English, Mature Modern English, to American English. The book begins with a discussion of the present status and structure of English. Each…

Several types of narrative errors are discussed that were found in the course of an analysis of stories collected in casual settings from a number of American speakers in undirected conversation. The approach to the question of error correction is sociocultural; the emphasis is on the motivation for the error correction. This paper explores the…