Americans tend to derive nicknames and more intimate affectionate nicknames from a person's formal first name; the type of name used depends on the social situation and the relationship between the two people. In many cases, for both masculine and feminine names, the nickname is derived from the first (or sometimes the second) syllable of the…

This guide was designed to provide both the occasional and the professional bilingual Spanish-English translator with some working definitions based on modern linguistics and to call his or her attention to certain difficulties in translating. Sections on the following are included: (1) context sensitivity, (2) frequency matching, (3) style…

The purpose of this book is to describe the phonological and grammatical structures of modern Guarani, as it is spoken today in Asuncion and neighboring regions of Paraguay. An introductory section considers the linguistic classification of Guarani, gives some background on its speakers, and discusses the sources used for this study. Part I,…

A system of 20 Fortran and PL/1 programs, developed for an analysis of aphasic and normal speech transcripts, is described in detail. The programs aid in lexical, grammatical, paralinguistic and statistical analyses, as well as in data preparation and correction. They can also be used in schizophrenic and other kinds of pathological language and…

One of the most significant problems that linguists face in their attempts to describe Vernacular Black English (VBE) is the matter of fluctuating forms. It is consistently observed that speakers appear to fluctuate between a socially stigmatized variant and its presumed nonstigmatized counterpart. Fluctuations in VBE have often been viewed as a…

Oral interpretation utilizes the self-referencing qualities of language and literature which involves the interpreter as both actor and reader. By "self-referencing" is meant the capacity language has to express not only literal meaning but also, at the same time, the process of realization and of attitudinizing toward this meaning.…

The assumptions of sociolinguistics are contrasted with those of its more static predecessors in light of their potential for bearing on educational problems. The focus on variability with regard to sex, age, style, socioeconomic status, race, education is more akin to the dynamics of the linguistic and educational setting in which a child finds…

Sociolinguistics is characterized by a concern for viewing language variation and for seeing language in real social contexts. It has a high potential for relationship and application to other fields such as education, sociology, and psychology. Sociolinguistics try to study the speech of a community, and instead of studying the presence or…

Course designers and teachers of English as a second or foreign language need a pedagogical grammar, that is, a collection of linguistic statements about English which specifies the linguistic behaviors that an ESL/EFL learner will need to acquire and which can easily be used in the preparation of materials and lessons. Pedagogical grammars…

The distinction between formal and casual English as reflected in the lexicon, in phonology, and in syntax is studied. Formality is treated as separate from other categorizations of language such as geographical origin of the speaker, social class of the participants, or specific context of discourse. The study was restricted mainly to the use of…

The English language is not a monolithic entity but an amalgam of many different varieties that can be associated respectively with groups of speakers, with individuals, and with the occasion. Among such varieties are slang, regional and class dialects, the language of children, and the language used by public speakers, journalists, lawyers,…

A collection of articles from "The Language of Man" series is presented which describe the ways in which we think and act. The articles deal with semantics, the language of advertising, language and race, and language and politics; they are augmented by humorous features, examples from real life, and graphics. The style is informal. The book is…

This book is based on the York Computer Inventory of Prose Style, which seeks to provide a quantitative description of the syntactic characteristics of the literary language of specific authors over the last 400 years. After a brief theoretical introduction and a description of texts and sampling procedures, the discussion turns to specific…

The ways speakers of Black English modify features of their spoken dialect in the process of adapting their language to writing are examined in this dissertation, on the basis of a corpus of writing from 41 black students enrolled in a St. Louis community college composition course. Each student is represented by 500 to 1000 words of writing…