Reports experiments in which college students provided color names for a series of color stimuli, matched color names with the same stimuli, and described colors represented by a series of elaborate color terms. Sex-related differences were found in the matching task. Women used more elaborate descriptions than men. (Author/AMH)

Notes that contemporary poets are writing sensitive and imaginative poetry that offers children insights into life and fun. (FL)

Explains several techniques for improving students' vocabulary through increasing their interest in and sensitivity to language. (JL)

Argues that sentences in the "have a V" frame are not idiosyncratic, but exhibit orderly and systematic behavior and are governed by strict semantic rules. Discusses 10 subtypes, each with a slightly different semantic formula. (EKN)

Hails the vitality of the French language in the Quebec region as it manifests itself through advertisements, from political slogans to storefront signs. Discusses the relationship between the language of the Quebecois and their culture, and offers an effective visual commentary through numerous illustrations. (MES)

Describes a study which investigated how much teachers of children with severe learning disabilities alter their grammatical complexity, sentence length, and vocabulary to match the developmental level of their students. (AM)

Presents the first part of a glossary of new social and political terms. Each entry is followed by a paragraph defining its meaning and origin, and by one or more quotations, where the word appears in unusually extensive contexts. Quotations are taken mostly from the news media. (MES)

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…

Discusses results of a questionnaire survey on the use of dialect words by older adults in Canada's Prince Edward Island. (HTH)

The theory and practice of analyzing jokes, with implications for class discussions. (RL)

Examines the use of the second person pronoun in Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale" to demonstrate that students of medieval texts may well miss important areas of meaning if they fail to give adequate attention to the historical study of language. (GT)

Discusses ways to insure that the current emphasis on grammar, concrete structure, and explicit simplicity do not edge out the development of writing that is forceful and engaging. (FL)

Judgments of utterance appropriateness were examined in three, four, five, and six year olds to examine bases for these judgments in a variety of social contexts. The judgments of the six year olds more closely resembled those of a group of adults, but their judgments were not yet free of some of the factors operative for the younger children.…

The modal "should" can be taught by first delineating its meaning of "good advice," then proceeding to its meaning as expressing the speaker's sense of duty, propriety, and expediency, and finally dealing with its meaning of "reasonable expectation." The elements of "must" implicit in "should"…

Discusses the use of cue cards in order to help language students practice formal and informal ways of saying the same thing. This draws attention to the influence of context on the way a communicative interaction is expressed linguistically. Lesson forms and source materials are also delineated. (PJM)