The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is far more anxious to promote the First Amendment premise that broadcasters should air controversial programing than it is worried about the occasional use of "four-letter words" by broadcasters. The FCC and Supreme Court decisions in the "Pacifica" case affect only the broadcasting…

A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

Data on English article usage, based on a new classification system ("a,""the," and null article), were obtained from 20 adults and 20 two- and three-year-old children. An oral sentence completion technique was used with the child subjects, and the same items in written form were used with the adults. The results for the older…

Since language largely derives from social interaction, preschool children should be provided many opportunities to converse, question and play with words. In this way children learn what to do with language in order to communicate effectively and appropriately. Recently begun investigations of language as it is actually used may produce findings…

The variation seen as deviation among the nonstandard styles of English does not represent a decay of the language, but rather, is necessary for simplification and other changes of English structure. The modern-day English pronominal system resulted from the incorporation of Scandinavian forms in the North and East Midland dialects of Middle…

THIS TEST--"VARIETIES OF ENGLISH"--WAS DESIGNED BY THE OREGON CURRICULUM STUDY CENTER FOR A SEVENTH-GRADE LANGUAGE CURRICULUM. IT IS INTENDED TO ACCOMPANY THE CURRICULUM UNITS AVAILABLE AS ED 010 149 AND ED 010 150. (MM)

This is the first in a series of self-instructional modules dealing with common English idioms, and is intended for use in the learning of English as a foreign language. The idioms were selected for frequency and usage in up-to-date usage in North America. The situations in which the idioms appear are in authentic conversational English, many of…

Puppetry has potential for illuminating many aspects of human life. One of these aspects, the system of language and speech, is explored here. An examination of the widespread use of a voice-modifying instrument to provide the puppets' voices demonstrates that traditional puppeteers act both as folk linguists and as folk sociolinguists. The study…

A survey of 210 professional communicators measured their sensitivity to the problem of readability, especially as it has been treated in the plain English movement (the drive to improve written materials and to make the unreadable readable). The results of the survey showed that 23% of the communicators rated the plain language concept…

Noting that identifying and inferring cause and effect relationships is critical to the receptive language use of both listeners and readers, this paper describes the various constructions used to express cause and effect and discusses the problems in comprehending them. Various sections of the paper discuss (1) the form of cause and effect…

An experiment was conducted to investigate the hypothesis that English cliches reflect sex-specific styles of speech and that sex-specificity of expressions is related to differential usage by male and female speakers. Hypotheses were derived from Tyler's claims that the "neutral sphere" is infused by the male style, rendering it an inhibiting…

This volume reports on the results of a survey conducted to determine the language attitudes of South Africans. Speakers of Afrikaans as a first language (Afrikaners) appear more willing than native speakers of English (ESSAs) to use a second language (L2), but only outside the family circle. The ESSA feels comfortable using the L2 with the…

Philosophical works and sociological writings from the seventeenth through the twentieth century are analyzed in this paper to learn the degree to which their use of generics (linguistic terms such as "mankind" that are used to refer to all humans) can be said to have actual reference to all adults without consideration of sex. The paper notes…

DESPITE EFFORTS TO SUBSTITUTE "DIALECT" FOR "USAGE" IN THE GRAMMARIAN'S VOCABULARY, THERE IS STILL A PLACE FOR THE LATTER TERM, FOR WITHIN ANY DIALECT THERE ARE MANY CHOICES OF FORM, WORD, AND CONSTRUCTION. THE TEACHING OF USAGE CAN BE FOUNDED ON TWO SIMPLE PRINCIPLES--(1) THE EXTENT OF SOCIAL PENALTY FOR USING THE ITEM AND (2) THE FREQUENCY OF…

A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…