This paper studies legal language from three perspectives. First, legal language is defined as the variety of English that lawyers, judges, and other members of the legal community use in the course of their work. In a second section, it reviews descriptions of legal language by lawyers, linguists, and social scientists. These studies indicate…

Based on a model developed by Brown and Levinson (1978), this thesis examines one feature underlying appropriate language use--politeness--as it affects the discourse of native English speakers in three situations. The three situations and speakers involved are: (1) British speakers in a British public library, (2) American speakers in an American…

Definitions of communicative competence and research on developing communicative competence in a second language are reviewed and implications for teaching are discussed. Communicative competence refers not only to knowledge of the forms of a language but to their functions and appropriate use in context. Five areas of communicative competence are…

This is a report on the activities of the survey of spoken English at the University of Lund (Sweden), during the period 1975-81. The aim of the survey has been to make available in machine-readable form a corpus of material with its origin in speech. The corpus was built in conjunction with the survey of English usage project at the University of…

The most appropriate vehicle for examining the role of language in producing sex role stereotypes and sexism is Kenneth Burke's concept of the terministic screen, a definition of reality that directs the attention of the audience along a certain line of thought. Thus, once a linguistic term is accepted as reflecting reality, the term influences…

Noting that the writer's journal is both a memory bank for observations and a nonthreatening means of exploring language, this guide offers individual classroom strategies for making the journal a valuable writing instruction tool. Following an introduction, the guide is divided into sections as follows: (1) philosophy of journals in the…

This paper focuses on political change in Venezuela from a critical discourse analysis perspective that emphasizes the roles of the participants in the interaction to show how, with their actions, they are affected and affect others. An interactional approach based on Firth's categories of context (Firth, 1951) and conversational analysis is used…

This study uses Lansdown's approach to Vygotsky's theory of language and concept development as the basis for comparing the conceptual level Ghanaian children express in their native languages (Ga or Twi) and in their school language (English). (Editor)

The aim of our investigation was to see whether the previous findings of consistent social class differences in language usage held good when writing and not speech was the mode of communication and a more rigorous control was exercised over the influence of essay topic upon language. (Author)

This is the first cover-to-cover revision of the basic stylebook adopted in 1960 by United Press International and The Associated Press. Its primary purpose is to provide a set of consistent guidelines, reflecting current word usage, for newspaper editors handling wire-service copy and for others who follow the same style. The main entries, which…

The Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) communication skills lexicon, compiled for use in the development of elementary instruction, is a set of words used by children between kindergarten and sixth grade. Although the lexicon was originally derived from the most comprehensive and up-to-date sources available, the major studies on which the…

The Dutch deictics are typically given a locative analysis: the adverbial pronoun "hier" ("here") and the demonstrative "deze" ("this") are said to point near the speaker, "daar" ("there") and "die" ("that") to point far, with "er" (weak "there") and the article "de" ("the") left unspecified (Bech 1952:7). The present paper rejects this view,…

Certain intellectual phenomena, e.g. racist attitudes, are based on fixed formulas of everyday speech. The linguistic roots of such evils must be discerned before they can be exorcised. Some cliches, e.g. racist ones, insinuate themselves into verbal behavior structures. French cliches reflect certain collective French attitudes: positive towards…