In 1922, Otto Jespersen hypothesized that women were more fluent (exhibited less hesitation in oral expression) than men because they had smaller and more central vocabularies, consisting of common words and combinations. Men's vocabularies were considered more extensive due to the inclusion of numerous novel, technical, and infrequently used…

The Japanese system of honorification shows respect either to the subject or to the direct or indirect object of the sentence. The selection of the polite or plain styles of speech determines the level of honorifics. The increase in mass communication and public speaking has led to a search for a reasonably polite but not old-fashioned or pompous…

"Macbeth" is best understood by considering five specific elements: (1) the tragic view--a recognition of man's dignity as well as his vulnerability to evil; (2) the tragic plot--the reversals in the plans of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the scene of recognition of impending disaster, and Macbeth's continual suffering; (3) the tragic…

The writer introduces the idea of sociolinguistic competence, the ability of a speaker to produce and recognize an infinite number of inter-idiolectal code switches, and discusses two methods of dealing with such language variations: frequency analysis and implicational analysis. In frequency analysis, the method used by sociolinguists such as…

The author outlines a study comparing the modes of communication in two newspapers: "Jen Min Jih Pao" (People's Daily) and the Des Moines"Register." He applies a content-category system, based on Hayakawa's trichotomy of sentence types, to the reporting of these two newspapers on five major international events: the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, the…

The chief insistence of the educational reform that Peter Ramus initiated in the sixteenth century in England was that the liberal arts should exist as separate and distinct disciplines, divided from one another. He split the old rhetorical laws to avoid duplication between dialectic and rhetoric and thus influenced the style of preaching found in…

Recording, narrative, exposition, and argument were hypothesized to present writing tasks of increasing cognitive and verbal complexity. This was investigated by obtaining writing samples in each mode from a stratified sample of 128 Australian sixteen year olds. The cognitive-complexity hypothesis was supported by data concerning the relative…

The conversational language of 28 men and women born in Maine around the beginning of this century is described and analyzed as it relates to Lakoff's hypotheses in "Language and Women's Place." Transcripts were gathered by students as part of an interdisciplinary course, Women of Maine. Results indicated that there is a traditional…

Describes a process for the objective evaluation of teaching personnel with emphasis on teacher effectiveness, student-teacher communication and interaction in the classroom and academic results. A list of aims and principles of the evaluation, the criteria used and the questionnaire for such a survey are included. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Uses examples of poetry by Australians to show how response to a poem depends on being a good listener; detecting with accuracy the tone of voice that governs the poem. (RL)

Selected phonological, morphological, and syntactic evidence from two hours of tape recordings of conversations of a four-year-old Native American New Mexican was examined to determine its value in assessing the child's bidialectalism. (Author/SW)

Three techniques used in the training of translators and interpreters at the Monterey Institute which may be suitable for advanced language study are conceptualization, stylistic transposition, and sight translation. Language students may acquire the cultural and social ambiance of the target language through such training. (SW)

This article describes a study attempting to correlate language style in elementary school children with sociocultural factors. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

This article outlines ways of helping students to develop informal or expressional features at the non-verbal level of communication. (DB)

A brief study of terms of address and reference in three examples of regional French of the departments of Sarthe and Mayenne. The questions raised in the study deal with ethnology, ethnolinguistics, popular or familiar French and traits of spoken French. (Text is in French.) (AMH)