Provides a sociolinguistic account of the forms of address used in present-day Iranian Persian. The shift from power to solidarity as a result of the Islamic Revolution has resulted in a sociolinguistic simplification of address forms. (Author/CB)

Identifies motives for the inversion of various preverbal elements to the end of sentences in Beijing conversational discourse, focusing on such communicative functions and organizational mechanisms as thematization, repair, and afterthought appendage. (32 references) (CB)

Reviews a wide-ranging formal analysis of Chinese syntax that explores the role of case theory in the phrase structure of Chinese. (15 references) (CB)

Advocates a macroscopic view in examining the habitual linguistic differences between English and Chinese in their organization of thought in prosaic sentences and discourse. Awareness of these differences would be helpful in translating from English into Chinese and vice versa and Chinese language teaching. (Contains four references.) (JP)

A study of utterances marked by exemplification particles ("par exemple, disons") in Montreal oral French attempted to describe constraints governing choice of discourse variant. Variables examined include position of particle in the utterance, extendibility and reality of the example, order of constituent elements in argumentation, and…

A study investigated the use of three pragmatic expressions ("you know, you see, I mean") by female and male British English speakers to (1) establish actual differences in usage over a number of functions of the three expressions, and (2) discover any correlation of usage with same-sex vs. mixed-sex interaction. (Author/MSE)

Examines private speech utterances to understand children's verbal self-guidance during school task performances. Finds cognitive and metacognitive private speech utterances indicated children's approach to task performance; children with higher metacognitive levels of private speech were better able to self-regulate school tasks; and children's…

Presents a preliminary study of the use of the Spanish preposition "a" with inanimate direct object nouns (DOs). The properties of such constructions at the lexical, sentence, and discourse levels are described, and the general principles that condition the preposition's appearance are discussed. (21 references) (GLR)

In an examination of pronominal disagreements, this study examined how speakers on certain television interview programs resolve problems of agreement with formally singular epicene antecedents. The form most frequently used is "they," and some forms found in written English hardly occur. (54 references) (Author/LB)

Three experiments found that (1) nine-month olds listened more to two-syllable words with strong-weak stress patterns than weak-strong stress patterns; (2) six-month olds showed no preferences for stress patterns; and (3) nine-month olds showed preferences for strong-weak over weak-strong stress patterns in speech sounds passed through a low-pass…

Describes a writing assignment in which a teacher asked students to prepare a one-page autobiography written in E-Prime, a form of English deleting all forms of the verb "to be." Presents student comments that suggest that the assignment was highly beneficial. (HB)

The study compared semantic relationships expressed in the word meanings of 56 profoundly hearing-impaired subjects divided into children older than and younger than 9 years. Although there were significant differences between the groups on the number of semantic relationships produced, the groups did not differ significantly on the types or…

Operationalizes the concept of intertextuality by using it to analyze sample texts. Certain dimensions of intertextuality are described that have potential for building a framework for discourse analysis: interdiscursivity, textual transformations, and how texts constitute social identities. (Contains 35 references.) (JP)

This study compared the relative use by four male and four female youth with mental retardation of linguistic (grammatical) devices identified as characteristic of typical female speech (qualifying markers, question styles, and politeness terms). Females produced significantly more qualifying markers than did males, although neither question style…

This study compared verbal disfluency and accessory characteristics of 15 African-American and 15 White male stutterers (ages 8-12). Overall, no significant differences were found in verbal- or visual-disfluency behaviors on either reading or conversation tasks between the two groups. Also, no significant differences were found in attitudes toward…