The first volume of a study of the vitality of written Indian languages explains a computerized system for rating vitality and tests certain demographic variables, with statistical analysis, to determine their influence on the vitality rating. An introductory section examines the concept of linguistic vitality and issues of its measurement. The…

On the basis of evidence from general linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research, it is argued that the working hypotheses of the audiolingual habit theory are inconsistent with studies of human verbal learning tasks, and that transformation grammarians have shown convincingly that structuralist views of language are too narrow in scope. It…

Some of the problems inherent in a word-based hypothesis asserting that the word/stem is taken as the minimal sign not only for syntax but also for morphology are examined in an analysis of a polysynthetic language, Koyukon, an Athabaskan language of Alaska. Data from the Central dialect is considered in the analysis. A brief sketch of the verbal…

A discussion of the mechanism of totalitarian indoctrination institutionalized in the Romanian educational system focuses on verbal interaction in school and school-related situations before the revolution of December 1989. Pragmatic analysis of the political language used in a variety of academic contexts (political science, political education,…

A study investigated the functional relationship that exists when mental ability and language competence are separately and simultaneously measured with regard to their influence on the effective treatment of verbal information. Data were gathered from 100 men and women, aged 20-60, who were tested for language competence, reading comprehension,…

A study of dialectal variation in Mexican Sign Language (MSL), the primary language for a large segment of Mexico's deaf community, is presented. Signs used by nine different sources representing various locations, ages, and social groups are compared. The first section reviews a number of previous informal assessments of dialectal variation in…

A 1985 survey of Swiss military recruits, aged about 20, and a 1987 survey of comparable Swiss women concerning their attitudes toward English as a possible lingua franca for their multilingual country are reported. Samples consisted of responses from German-speaking Switzerland (1,930 males, 324 females), French-speaking Switzerland (1,133 males,…

A study investigated the relationship between sex and social class in the spontaneous speech of 16 individuals from Newcastle upon Tyne (England). Specifically, the study examined the frequency of glottalized variants of three voiceless stops, and treated variation by sex as separate from, not a byproduct of, variation by class. Subjects were four…

This study investigated the degree to which Portuguese students (n=100) educated in France switched or mixed languages in a written essay. Subjects were told to express themselves liberally in either or both languages. A linguistic history was also taken for each student. The measures were administered in a French-language school, and instructions…

The most developed supra-national language-based movement today is la Francophonie, the movement representing all of the populations of the world that speak French. French is an international language and is spoken in many parts of the world, although the exact number of francophones is not known. La Francophonie has a number of major…

The extensive use of clausal embedding in legal language is examined. The extent and depth of left-branching, nested, and right- branching clauses in the 1972 British Road Traffic Act are also studied. The complexity of the resulting constructions, and the problems created for comprehension are described. The analysis reveals complex sequences of…

A study of the semantic factors determining the choice of "go to" and "will" in some varieties of spoken English looks at intentionality and premeditation, imminence, observation, presence on the scene of action, certainty, inference and observation, knowledge and certainty, present relevance and immediacy of action, children's acquisition of…

Composing written text in an educational context engages both students and teachers in struggles between convention and choice, resulting frequently in the negotiation of compromises with which neither teachers nor students feel comfortable. The linguistic traditions of a discipline are powerful determinants of the nature of the language in which…

This collection of papers on semantics and cohesion is organized into two sections: Meaning and Semantics, and Textual Cohesion. Titles and authors are as follows: "Functional Text Semantics, Idioms, and Variability" (Jan-Ola Ostman); "On the Degree of Motivation in Signs Used in Metaphors Involving Plant Symbolism" (Ralf…

Factors in reading comprehension relating to English as a second language (ESL) are considered, focusing on what contributes to text comprehensibility (grammatical structure or density of new vocabulary), the effect of a learner's English language proficiency on use of grammatical words for comprehension, and the possible interaction of these…