Urges student involvement in classroom activities, rather than formal classroom teaching, in learning English as a second language. (LG)

This paper undertakes the study of the occurrence of non-corresponding demonstrative forms in Spanish, Basque and English in exactly the same linguistic context. It is proposed that the differences in the choice of the demonstratives result from the differences in the kind of information that must be coded in each of the languages. Thus, I will…

Discusses the results of research which revealed that students in third and fifth forms favored oral rather than written situations when studying language. (RB)

Investigated were the effects of five verbalizing methods (subject speaks, reads, writes, listens, or does not verbalize) on short-term retention of the ability to use discovered generalizations. No significant differences were found among the effects of the verbalizing methods for a retention test. (JP)

This paper examines the formal and functional properties of code-switching among Mexican-American children. Two formal types of code-switching, code-mixing and code-changing, are identified, and developmental patterns in their use are discussed. Two major functional types of code-switching are also differentiated. The first, situational…

This paper: (1) examines the internal word structure of Cantonese in terms of root, stem and affix; (2) discusses general problems of word analysis in Chinese with reference to Cantonese and Mandarin; (3) examines the issue of distorted translations from Mandarin into English resulting from faulty word analysis; and (4) looks briefly at the…

In both speaking and writing, the goal is communication with the intended audience. Rejecting the view that rhetoric is based on an established set of conventions, this article examines the writings of Charles Dickens as models of rhetorical expression. Passages from Dicken's novels illustrate how the writer violated grammatical rules and broke…

This paper examines aspects of variation in child language, and specifically how children express causal relations in complex sentences. Four particular types of variation were observed: (1) the order of clauses and the connectives used to link clauses; (2) mothers' causal statements; (3) interaction of language form and content, in the form of…

This paper analyzes the prophetic speech of Ga spirit mediums in terms of its linguistic style and its socio-religious function. As used in the study, "prophetic speech" is understood to have two major characteristics: (1) glossolalic style, and (2) prophetic message content, and it is used by people believed to be possessed by spirits. Prophetic…

A general observation about the vocabularies of most languages is that they tend to increase in size over time. Little is known about the causal mechanisms involved in this lexical expansion, but most anthropologists and linguists are in agreement that it probably mirrors general cultural evolution. The study of lexical growth becomes important if…

Frequently, government writing is filled with complex and obscure jargon, or "gobbledygook." This book was written for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employees, in order to call their attention to the need for simple, concise writing. The first two chapters provide a formula for judging the difficulty of a piece of writing and show how writers…

This study compared the vocabulary of the period from 1943 to 1945 to the vocabulary of 1975. In addition to a direct comparison of word use, an indirect comparison was made using Thorndike's word list in the "Teacher's Word Book" (1931). The 1975 vocabulary, based on frequency of word appearance, was derived from 93 speeches made by students in…

Argues that, considering the widespread pluralism in dialects in the Black community, the linguists' use of the term "Black English" to describe the language of only one group of blacks seems an example of poor communication between linguists and the general public; and that linguistists cannot afford to ignore the racial plays for power in the…