To test whether verbal choices in a persuasive setting would show less diversity and more qualification than those in a nonpersuasive setting, a study involving 24 college students was undertaken. The subjects were divided into five groups and each group was asked to role play two situations: one calling for the subjects merely to be…

This report was prepared by the United States Metric Association (USMA) to present supportive evidence on the desirability of using the international English language spelling, metre, for the International System of Units (SI) unit of length, and litre for the common metric unit of volume. It contains a statement by the USMA, some background…

The author encourages American parents of Chinese ancestry to use the Chinese language with their children whenever this is possible. It is a major opportunity for children to learn an important second language while they are young enough to do so naturally, without conscious effort. Although it is more difficult when parents are speakers of…

Intended as a survey of the use of "weasel words" (a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to mean an equivocal word intended to deprive a statement of its force), this book discusses these words both as a part of the historical process of language change and as a misleading and confusing element in current media. Humorous in tone, the book presents…

The ten papers in this volume are largely revisions of papers presented at the Texas conference, held March 22-24, 1973. The first paper, "Against Universal Semantic Representation," by Gilbert Harman, argues against the need for (and the possibility of) a level of semantic representation in a theory of language. "Remarks on the…

This paper describes a graduate course for language arts teachers at Georgia State University in Atlanta, titled Social Dialects and Language Learning. Classroom procedures and activities in the course were organized into five cumulative, related phases to engage the teachers in useful fieldwork in order to achieve major objectives of the course.…

A sociolinguistic, ethnographic analysis of Christian Science oral testimonies is reported in this study. The study is based on the analysis of transcripts of four testimonial meetings of a branch church, interpreted through knowledge of Christian Science official literature, informal interaction with Christian Scientists, and knowledge of other…

Full reading comprehension is dependent on a knowledge of language usage, specifically, how syntactic constructions function in relation to pragmatic knowledge. To avoid some of the problems which might arise concerning the pragmatic aspects of reading comprehension, the following steps may be taken: teach children very early the relationship…

This study was designed to investigate four problem areas of communication research: source credibility, language intensity, the gender of source as it affects the source's persuasiveness and credibility, and the scarcity of multifactor studies using gender of source as one of the independent variables. Independent variables for the study, which…

This paper describes the "euphemistic lexicographical technique," which is recommended for use by lexicographers for the frank recording of vulgar speech. This is a monodirectional technique to be used in bilingual dictionaries prepared for speakers of only one of the two languages. The vulgar words will not appear in the source language…

Political language employed in serious inquiry differs systematically from language employed to promote loyalty to authority in respect to syntax; grammatical completeness and complexity; proportion of nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech; and forms of qualification. Formal language entails continuous effort at verfication or falsification and…

This study explored the viability of several theories in describing adjective memory. For the study, college students were told either to form images or to learn sentences. A noun-prompted sentence recall task exposed their memory for adjectives modifying either subject nouns. Results revealed that subject modifiers were better remembered than…

This paper discusses specific issues involving governmental conduct in communication with the public, outlines a set of conditions that frequently stimulate social interest in governmental responsibility, and develops a corresponding set of guidelines for use in the evaluation of instances of questionable governmental conduct in communication.…

In spoken and written situations which focused the teachers' attentions on information rather than on their language, samples of 100 English teachers' actual language were obtained with respect to five debatable usages: "everybody...their,""reason...is because,""who" as an object pronoun, "will/would" with the first person subject to express…

This paper discusses some of the factors involved in deciding which variety of English to teach in areas of African where English is the language of education. Three main alternatives are recognized: American English, British English, or African English. Until recently, English was taught almost exclusively with British materials, and students…