Designed to assess a reader's comprehension of items differing in contrastive vocal stress, this test consists of 64 items divided evenly between eight sentence types: declarative active, declarative passive, interrogative, and imperative, with each in a positive and negative form. The element of contrastive stress is placed on nouns functioning…

The assumption that language is used solely to convey information with the maximum efficiency is refuted with examples of expository prose. Eight brief samples of expository prose are examined in order to demonstrate the use of syntactic euphemism to manipulate communication in complex and subtle ways. Syntactic euphemism involves the use of the…

The proposal presented in this article is the outcome of a realistic review of the contemporary status of society and its educational enterprise. In it the author utilized humor and coined words to emphasize his approach to solving university administrative problems. (Author/RK)

Demonstrates that prior to the beginning of the prescriptive grammar movement in English, singular "they" was accepted. By analogy with socially motivated changes in second person pronouns in various European languages, it is suggested that third person pronoun usage will be affected by current feminist opposition to sex-indefinite "he."…

Criticizes the traditional establishment stand on teaching Standard English, with particular emphasis on a previous article in this journal by Karen M. Hess. (RM)

This article discusses the definition, classification, etymology and history, formation and the use of acronyms, and provides a list of the most common acronyms currently in use. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

This article defines the linguistic situation in Puerto Rico and explains why the term "bilingualism" cannot be used to accurately describe the linguistic reality there. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

This article discusses the problems that arise with the formation of plural forms of surnames in Spanish, problems both with morphology and with ambiguity. Suggestions as to how to lessen problems are made. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Given that a word in a language may function on different levels of meaning, this article presents a system for classifying these levels. The common denominator is the point of view of the speaker; the emotive, the representative and the concrete are the basic divisions within this common denominator. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

The author presented a short history of his Irish heritage and defended his family's ethnic contributions to American culture with the plea that ethnicity should be encouraged as a cultural strength rather than as a threat to American cultural cohesion. (RK)

Language is not fixed and uniform, but occurs in many variants, social, occupational, etc. These correspond to various roles in society. The learner must be prepared to assume such roles, and must try to achieve practical mastery of the corresponding language variant. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Three types of jokes are distinguishable according to the style of speech used: 1) the merely prosaic joke, 2) the joke with a fictitious dialogue, and 3) the dialogue joke. These are analyzed in terms of communication, discourse analysis, and semantics. (Text is in German.) (DS)

Concludes that the German used in the east Belgium newspaper differs fr om standard High German. Proceeds to list these differences in the areas of lexicology, semantics and stylistics, morphology and syntax, orthography e tc. (Text is in German.) (DS)

A study of integration of English lexicon into the Spanish spoken in New Mexico considers formal English, formal Spanish and the informal mixture spoken by local Chicanos. (CK)

This article examines how verbs function as implicit quantifiers of the direct object. The results indicate that positive verbs such as buy, have, build, or produce imply fewer member of the direct object set than more negative verbs such as hate, fear, avoid, or ignore. (DE)