Facts on the grammar of Kazakh, spoken in Kazakhstan, are presented. They are intended as a guide, not an instructional text. Information is presented in the form of notes and word lists on the following topics: orthography (the Cyrillic alphabet, spelling reform, stylistic and dialectal alternations, common misspellings, and homographs);…

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…

A discussion of Hungarian spoken discourse focuses on the role of two pragmatic connectives, "hat" ("well, so (after all)") and "mert" ("because"). Introductory sections discuss the classification of utterance-types as a prerequisite to analyzing discourse and the utterance-type as defined by pragmatic…

A discussion of guides to English usage intended for Hong Kong speakers of English as a Second Language offers general comments on such guides, often written in Chinese and less commonly written in English, and more specific comments on one guide, written in English. The latter guide was analyzed for errors and misleading information. A large…

A study investigated the way given and new information is conveyed in Korean discourse by applying a taxonomy of given-new information, based on English discourse, to Korean. The taxonomy presumes that information packaging in natural language reflects sender's hypotheses about receiver's assumptions, beliefs, and strategies. Two types of Korean…

A study investigated the way in which monolingual English-speaking college students developed new concepts for the linguistic structures and sociocultural symbolic meanings of gender that are unique to the Spanish language. Subjects were seven students of first-year intensive Spanish. They were asked to perform two problem-solving tasks: defining,…

Articles included in this compilation represent functional approaches to literary analysis. Most of these papers were presented at the Sixteenth International Systemics Congress held in Helsinki, Finland, in 1989. The aim of the congress was to establish dialogue between various functional approaches to the theoretical study of language, to…

A study analyzed the opening and closing sequences of 11 dyads of native Spanish-speakers in natural telephone conversations conducted in Spanish. The objective was to determine how closely Hispanic cultural patterns of conduct for telephone conversations follow the sequences outlined in previous research. It is concluded that Spanish…

A construction occurring in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is examined: NPi "call" NPi V"-ing", as in "the woman call herself working." First, a number of reasons that such a form might be overlooked or dismissed as an AAVE dialect form are outlined. Then the sociolinguistic method is applied to the…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the existence of nonsubject binding of the so-called long distance anaphor in languages like Korean and Japanese and to give a principled account of why and when it happens. The Korean reflexive pronoun "caki" ('self') is bound by local and long-distance antecedents. Nonsubject binding occurs…

The Concept Attainment Model is a teaching strategy based on analysis of the nature of concepts and how they are acquired. Using this theory, three strategies for second language instruction have been developed: the reception, selection, and unorganized materials strategies. In the reception strategy, the most structured, students must be guided…

A study investigated the phonemic and morphophonemic patterning of the glottal stop in Agutaynen, a Meso-Philippine language, and some comparison with two northern Philippine languages. Agutaynen glottal stop has as its sole origin a neutralization of contrast rule, the operation of which can be noted in three different linguistic environments.…

In studying sociolinguistic rules, researchers must be aware of some guiding principles: that (1) these rules are below the conscious level of awareness, and (2) rules of speaking differ across cultural groups, with none being more correct than another. Even when members of different cultural groups interact in the same language they may find it…

Many tone languages exhibit some form of downdrift or automatic downstep, the lowering of high tones separated by low tones. In extreme cases, the realization of high tones at the end of a domain (such as the sentence) may be lower than the realization of low tones at the beginning. Tone languages with this property are cross-level tone languages.…

Examines two versions of the alphabet to show how psychological evidence indicates that grammar is best which best approximates the system people have in their heads. (RB)