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)

Author described efforts to modernize a system of writing, extremely difficult to teach and to learn, and assessed the benefits of changing from traditional characters to a Latin alphabet including the cost that would be involved: the separation of modern Chinese writing from the heritage of the past. (Editor/RK)

A test of the linguistic attitudes of teachers toward Black, Anglo, and Mexican-American children. (CH)

Concludes that the tendency to produce speech interruptions at the beginning of utterances, or pronouns, and conjunctions appears to be a characteristic of young children's speech. (RB)

The normalization of French and the selection of German as a second language over the traditional Alsatian is discussed. The teaching of the dialect has more often than not been promoted as an argument against German, and not as a serious proposition. The author encourages some bilingual education. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

An examination of recent cases involving press releases and public relations writers indicates that courts have devised several ways, including the use of guidelines set out by the Ollman (from "Ollman v. Evans") four-factor test, to make the distinction between fact and opinion. The four-factor test helps courts to assess (1) whether…

The situation in which an individual refers not to himself but to his role (e.g., a dean says, "It is the responsibility of the Dean..." instead of "It is my responsibility...") is considered. It is argued that in some circumstances, when a speaker uses certain kinds of definite descriptions to refer to himself, he may be…

The Cree and Cherokee syllabary systems were designed by gifted amateurs, such as Sequoyah, who received no funding or significant institutional support. Although he had influential kinsmen in his matrilineage, his project encountered active, widespread opposition from his contemporaries prior to its validation in 1821. Sequoyah found it necessary…

The typical pattern of Chinese word formation is to have native material adapt to changed circumstances. The Chinese language neither borrows nor lends words, but it does occasionally borrow concepts. The larger cultural pattern in which this occurs is that the Chinese culture borrows, if necessary, but ensures that the act of borrowing does not…

A comparison of grammatical, lexical, and phonological differences between Spanish and Portuguese that resulted from a study of the two languages' mutual intelligibility is presented as a convenient list of items that assumes a basic language knowledge in the user. The information is presented in five sections: (1) phonological contrasts (phonemic…