A survey of 210 professional communicators measured their sensitivity to the problem of readability, especially as it has been treated in the plain English movement (the drive to improve written materials and to make the unreadable readable). The results of the survey showed that 23% of the communicators rated the plain language concept…

Noting that identifying and inferring cause and effect relationships is critical to the receptive language use of both listeners and readers, this paper describes the various constructions used to express cause and effect and discusses the problems in comprehending them. Various sections of the paper discuss (1) the form of cause and effect…

An experiment was conducted to investigate the hypothesis that English cliches reflect sex-specific styles of speech and that sex-specificity of expressions is related to differential usage by male and female speakers. Hypotheses were derived from Tyler's claims that the "neutral sphere" is infused by the male style, rendering it an inhibiting…

This volume reports on the results of a survey conducted to determine the language attitudes of South Africans. Speakers of Afrikaans as a first language (Afrikaners) appear more willing than native speakers of English (ESSAs) to use a second language (L2), but only outside the family circle. The ESSA feels comfortable using the L2 with the…

Philosophical works and sociological writings from the seventeenth through the twentieth century are analyzed in this paper to learn the degree to which their use of generics (linguistic terms such as "mankind" that are used to refer to all humans) can be said to have actual reference to all adults without consideration of sex. The paper notes…

DESPITE EFFORTS TO SUBSTITUTE "DIALECT" FOR "USAGE" IN THE GRAMMARIAN'S VOCABULARY, THERE IS STILL A PLACE FOR THE LATTER TERM, FOR WITHIN ANY DIALECT THERE ARE MANY CHOICES OF FORM, WORD, AND CONSTRUCTION. THE TEACHING OF USAGE CAN BE FOUNDED ON TWO SIMPLE PRINCIPLES--(1) THE EXTENT OF SOCIAL PENALTY FOR USING THE ITEM AND (2) THE FREQUENCY OF…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

The questionnaire presented here was designed to be administered to a representative sample of Ethiopian children enrolled in primary and secondary schools. Responses to be elicited pertain to --(1) personal use of language in several domains of speech behavior, (2) use of language by others in situations which the respondent has had an…

Recently, communications scholars and theorists have begun formulating rules to describe the workings of language in various situations of everyday use. Theoretically, current rules approaches are in violation of the basic philosophy underlying communication theory--Whitehead's notion of process. The inconsistency is a function of the degree of…

The concept of cognitive egocentrism is presented, supported with experimental evidence, and operationally defined on a scale of egocentric distance from "ego" ("speaker") to "hearer," to "other," to "concrete entity." This concept is used in evaluating the hypothesis that the nominative case in…

The varied forms and semantic factors of Japanese ordinal expressions are related to one another in a coherent system. In Japanese, the cardinal number form is a numeral compound in construction with a referent. The numeral compound consists of a number and a numeral adjunct. Numeral adjuncts are derived from bound forms, or numeral suffixes, and…

This study investigates the extent to which nonstandard forms of written English create for readers stereotypes of the writer's personality. To determine the extent to which nonstandard writing is apparent to speakers of standard and nonstandard English, and to what extent such writing represents a socioeconomic liability for the writer, two…

This paper examines semantic constraints governing the occurrence of interjections with various other types of grammatical phenomena. Four interjections, "oh,""ah,""say," and "well," which typically occur embedded in sentences, are discussed in terms of their semantic properties and possible contexts. It is…

Americans tend to derive nicknames and more intimate affectionate nicknames from a person's formal first name; the type of name used depends on the social situation and the relationship between the two people. In many cases, for both masculine and feminine names, the nickname is derived from the first (or sometimes the second) syllable of the…

This report, covering the period from July 1 to December 31, 1974, is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies concerning the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The manuscripts in this report include: speech perception, speech recognition through spectrogram matching, phonetic…