This is an analysis of the stylistic variation in English of a wide range of speakers. A main point is that in analyzing speech styles it is important to elecit more than one style from each speaker, as both interview conditions and other factors may influence style. The paper presents some concrete examples of two major stylistic divisions,…

This volume is an attempt to provide the sociology of language with the basic teaching-learning tools needed in order to facilitate its academic growth and consolidation. It provides the students and specialist in language planning with a comprehensive anthology of articles dealing with this area of research in the sociology of language. The…

This article examines several major sociological characteristics of the Caribbean region in a study of pidginization and creolization. Three major conditions which may have affected the ways that Creole languages develop are discussed. They include: (1) the relative proportion of Africans, Europeans, and other groups now present in specific…

The verbal interactions of eight mother-child pairs (four Hebrew-speaking mothers and four English-speaking mothers with their 24-month-old language learning children) were recorded and analyzed to determine the frequency of occurrence of various interrogative forms in the mothers' language. Results indicated that English-speaking mothers produced…

A number of "language" matters that students of English as a second language need to learn about are not treated in textbooks at all. Many of these are partly linguistic in nature and partly non-linguistic, involving other aspects of culture. One such matter is the cliche. For the native speaker of any language, a cliche is an expression…

Keeping vocabulary and content constant, it was determined whether syntactically more complex structures increase reading difficulty or whether all students, regardless of grade level, have the same syntactic skills and thus read with equal facility materials written at different syntactic maturity levels. One hundred and twenty randomly selected…

Structural linguistic techniques were utilized to categorize the grammatical elements employed by Robert Frost in 46 blank-verse poems. Nineteen main grammatical categories and 26 verb sub-categories based on distinctive selection criteria were devised to examine the range and distribution of Frost's grammatical patterns. Five control poems by E.…

The objectives of this study were (1) to analyze the linguistic structures and the linguistic deviations used by children in their written sentences, and (2) to compare the structures and deviations with the quality of the writing, as judged by three competent raters. Eighty fourth-grade and 80 sixth-grade children (8% black) from working-class…

Accepting the perfective aspect as the "marked" correlative of a true morphological correlation in the opposition of perfective:imperfective in Russian verb study, the author disregards non-systemic facts in order to concentrate on the aspect relations as they appear in "linear pairs". The author proceeds to describe the functions of the aspect…

A new dimension may be added to the study and teaching of a second language by the development of contrastive sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics is defined here as the study of how a person relates to another person in terms of language, and is concerned with relational utterances rather than factual statements. Relational utterances are those…

An investigation of the relationships between form and comprehension of written materials by eleventh grade students is reported in this paper. Students were asked to manipulate two variables of spacing and punctuation in a consistently administered and marked exercise. Students also completed a comprehension test on the exercise they had just…

Two-way radio communications between air traffic controllers using radar on the ground to give airplane pilots instructions are of interest within the developing framework of the sociology of language. The main purpose of air traffic control language is efficient communication to promote flight safety. This study describes the standardized format…

Three major hypotheses were tested in this study: (1) there will be a greater frequency of forward and backward eye fixation for that linguistically defined area of a selected exprimental sentence which contains the verb, as compared to either the area of the subject or the area of the object of the verb; (2) there will be differences in the…

This volume presents a compilation and translation of folktales and other forms of oral literature in the Kupia, Kotia Oriya, and Parengi Languages of India. Kupia and Kotia Oriya are Indo-Aryan languages, while Parengi is a Munda language. Language family differences are particularly obvious in the vocabulary and syntax of the different groups of…

A signature tree is a binary decision tree used to classify unknown patterns. An attempt was made to develop a computer program for manipulating signature trees as a general research tool for exploring machine learning and pattern recognition. The program was applied to the problem of speech recognition to test its effectiveness for a specific…