Conceding that there has been some insufficient sensitivity to the existence of women in the semantic choices of traditional English Grammar, this paper contends that the new feminist grammars confuse language with sexual politics. Issues discussed in the paper include the generic masculine occupation words; the prefix titling system (covering…

This pamphlet is the ninth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet describes a project that was undertaken to discover…

A training program for technical writers, in which a specialized information focus is used to ask questions about a text in the process of writing and revising, is the subject of this paper. The unique aspects of technical writing are defined according to the process whereby readers extract information from text. Reader expectations are classified…

Previous research has demonstrated that 11 linguistic indices discriminate between truthful and deceptive language behavior. On the basis of subjective judgment, the original researchers arranged these indices in clusters (dimensions) of deceptive language behavior: uncertainty, vagueness, negative affect, and reticence. The present study sought…

This collection of essays focuses on linguistic investigations of English, both spoken and written. The 12 chapters deal with Charles Dickens' linguistic criticism; eighteenth century prescriptivism; the relevance of language study to the study of Shakespeare; obstacles to the study of Old and Middle English; the contributions of R. G. Latham to…

Of the multitude of dialects which exemplify the Spanish language, Puerto Rican Spanish has suffered the most severe rejection by language purists and pseudolinguists. The need to take a clear and open look at Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico is preeminent. It is the purpose of this module to clarify some major points of controversy regarding Puerto…

This study investigated the relationships between teacher facilitative or directive verbal behavior in nursery school classrooms and seven aspects of child language change. Twenty-eight nursery teachers and 95 children from these classrooms were selected for this study. The teacher verbal behavior was measured by the Withall Social Climate Index,…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

The author of this paper argues that, in the study of current usage, we need to supplement data from corpus studies by using methods that elicit use, reports of use, and evaluations of use on items which interest them. Ten methods for experimental elicitation of such data are described, related to one another, and illustrated with examples of data…

The possibility is suggested that the meanings of words are abstracted far beyond the range of cognitive concept, and that the role words play in the meaning of sentences is similar to the role phonemes play in the meanings of words. The meanings of the various forms are classed into a single paradigm known as the verb "mot-u" which is one of the…

An extrinsic relationship between generative semantics and dialect geography should be exploited because contemporary transformational grammarians have too easily ignored the work of the dialectologist and have been too readily satisfied with what might be called armchair evidence. The work of the dialect geographers needs to be taken into…

John Searle's book, "Speech Acts," opened with the question, "How do words relate to the world?" This paper suggests a way of answering Searle's question by relying--in spirit if not in method--on Austin's linguistic phenomenology. The existential phenomenology approach is described in Austin's phrase as a "sharpened…

This paper asks whether the imprecision and complexity of natural language, as opposed to the language of science or logic, represent flaws or essential functional properties. It is argued that ambiguity can be manipulated by the speaker through environmentally derived characteristics. A discussion follows on the study of the functions of language…

The 74 studies cited in this selected, annotated bibliography represent major areas of research which may be useful to linguists. Structures Elicitation Techniques (SET) is a term used in contrast to naturalistic observational technique, and the methods referred to in the annotations as SETs are diverse but have in common the elicitation of…

The research findings of profane language usage need to be extended so that more may be learned about human communication. In order to establish profane language usage norms, eighty-six university students were asked to estimate their profane language usage in each of three categories (excretory, religious, and sexual) in reference to three…