Responds to the postmodern tendency to remove responsibility from the writing act by giving ultimate agency to the reader. Develops through Kenneth Burke an ethic of writing, an attitude toward language and language use that returns agency to the writer while still recognizing that he or she is acted upon by language. Describes a methodology to…

Bilinguals in the Southwestern United States use Spanish as an ethnic marker to accept other speakers as members of the in-group, or English to exclude them, in situations in which they have a choice of code. Shows that the choice of code used in El Paso, Texas is based on the perceived ethnicity of the other bilingual speaker. (Author/VWL)

Argues the infinitive phrase has not been taken seriously in writing because writers have been too concerned with Bishop Robert Lowth's proscription against the split infinitive. Notes that examination of three types of technical prose (instructions, annual reports, and "junk mail") reveals that more than one sentence in four contains an…

Investigates tendencies with regard to gender-specific or gender-non-specific designations in English and German by means of nouns in present-day usage as well as the historical development of these tendencies. (Author/VWL)

Considers that the prevalence of excellence may reveal more about the spread of sloganeering in support of brands otherwise indistinguishable to consumers than it does any change in institutional philosophies or management techniques. Offers a sample of seven types of management ambiguity with brief exegeses; branding, market share, success, core…

Recent changes in oath-taking in Kirundi-Kinyarwanda are presented and interpreted. Shows that new oath variants create quantitative and qualitative variability in form, significance, and use in the conceptualization and meaning of oaths. Such changes were initiated largely by European Christian missionaries who arrived in Burundi and Rwanda at…

Examined the influence of language gender systems on perception. Spanish-speaking (with a gender system) and English-speaking (with a limited gender system) participants from three age groups assigned typical male or female names and attributes to objects. Language gender tags influenced Spanish adults' and early adolescents' choice of gender…

Participants in six experiments were asked to assume that they were either the speaker or the recipient of a reply to a potentially face-threatening question. In all experiments, participants were more likely to interpret the replies as conveying an indirect negative meaning when they took the perspective of the recipient than when they took the…

This article reviews three articles that add to the debate on the terminology that is used to represent people who are blind. It argues that authority is not limited to just one person or one organization, but is shared through an intertextuality, or utterance, of other authorities, and that conflict within blind discourse communities does not…

Language relating to any concept will tend, over time, to acquire some of the concept?s emotional impact. Thus, words that were, at one stage, neutral become laden with meaning. This document discusses the importance of being aware of the effects that language usage has on communication. It is important to ensure that written and verbal…

We know that children are active participants in their acquisition of language. Their language patterns are learned in social contexts while they are interacting with other children and adults. Studies continue to confirm that the development of vocabulary and syntactic complexity in language are more advanced in children who are frequently…

Where social epistemology has been applied in environmental education research, certain words have come to be associated with it, such as, "social," "contextualized," "strategic," "political," "pragmatic," "democratic," and "participatory." In this paper, I first suggest interpretations of these words that potentially avoid absolutism, relativism,…

This paper examines how overt teaching is instrumental in reducing subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors of Malaysian EAP learners which in turn improves the quality of their writing. The researchers used overt teaching of these grammatical items, that is, SVA and investigated how this method has significantly benefitted the learners who were second…

This study examines the deployment of automated red light camera systems in the state of Texas from 2003 through late 2007. The deployment of new technologies in general, and surveillance infrastructures in particular, can prove controversial and challenging for the formation of public policy. Red light camera surveillance during this period in…

Short stories are considered as good resources that can be used in language classrooms. Laine (1997) suggests that in foreign language classes where there are children who are not motivated and who are low achievers, a story, if it is well-chosen, can help change their attitudes to the language. And, the narrative (or storytelling) approach is…