Offers a tentative explanation for the development of the phonological processes of aspiration and deletion of syllable final and word final position /s/ in Cuban Spanish. Summarizes other explanations of this phenomenon. (PMJ)

Gives an overview of the language situation on Ponape, with reference to social structure. (AM)

Defines language awareness, examines shifts in meaning which words undergo, and discusses how this topic can be applied in education. (DD)

A wide-ranging discussion with William Labov, a sociolinguist interested in the study of nonstandard dialects, especially Black English dialect. (DD)

Explored preschoolers' inferences about language and group membership. Found preschoolers believe minorities and people with unfamiliar clothing/dwellings are more likely to speak a foreign language; do not map social group differences to language for all categories; do not derive inferences from intelligibility; and identify common property in…

Investigates variable deletion of short vowels in word-final unstressed syllables in Latvian spoken in Riga. Affected vowels were almost always inflectional endings and results indicated that internal phonological and prosodic factors (especially distance from main word stress) were the strongest constraints on vowel deletion, along with the…

Argues that statistical analysis of the potential distinctiveness of near-merged contrastive pairs must simultaneously take into account several acoustical dimensions. Discriminant analysis of the speech of five Utah speakers distinguished near-merged contrasts but not homophones, suggesting that discriminant analysis is useful in assessing…

Discusses the significance of a Wittgensteinian approach to the ethics of language for world Englishes. Focuses on the role of metaphysics in the ethics of language and on the significance of context in the moral use of language. Argues that morality lies not only in its content but also in its use. (Author/VWL)

Discusses various theories of spelling development including their relevance to regularly spelled languages. Concludes that, as in other languages, children are integrating many different types of linguistic knowledge in their attempt to spell words correctly; dialect, orthography, and grammatical knowledge are all important. (SG)

Argues that the study of contact varieties of a language are relevant to understanding of second language acquisition and use, because non-canonical contact languages are often situated on a continuum between pidginization and the more general processes of untutored second language acquisition. Data on participle regularization in Namibian Black…

Examines the loss of palatalization assimilation in modern Russian within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Shows that this theory offers new explanations for the role of markedness and naturalness in the mechanism of a sound change and argues that OT provides new possibilities for relating quantitative patterns to the principles of…

Drawing on recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, sociology of language and linguistic anthropology, focuses on new approaches to explaining gender differentiated patterns of sound change and language shift, the success or failure of planned linguistic reforms, and changes in the social evaluation of gendered speech styles. (Author/VWL)

Offers an optimality theoretic account for the phonological process of across-word regressive assimilation (AWRA) in Picard, a Gallo-Romance dialect spoken in the Picardie region in Northern France and Southern Belgium. Focuses on the varieties spoken in the Vimeu region of France. Examines one particular topic in the analysis of AWRA: the…

Investigates an external variable critical to the understanding of sociolinguistic variation in a rural, tri-ethnic community in the Southern United States. Cultural identity is postulated as a speaker's orientation to the local and larger regional cultures, and in Warren County, North Carolina, this orientation correlates strongly with vernacular…

Presents the results of a cross-linguistic study of the role of scope phenomena in untutored second language acquisition, or how adult learners in different source and target language settings acquire the means to express which part of an utterance is semantically affected by scope-bearing elements such scope particles or negation. (Author/VWL)