This study investigated how native Japanese speakers use honorifics in everyday social interaction. Honorifics are affixes, words, and formulaic phrases that follow linguistic and sociolinguistic rules and are believed to mark a speaker's politeness toward an addressee or another referenced person. The honorific system is incorporated into most…

Incorporating an understanding of different varieties of English (particularly Cajun English) and the appropriateness of their use into the language arts curriculum can help speakers of dialects understand the origins of their language and the significance it plays in their lives. Educators who work with students who use Cajun English need to be…

This paper expands on schematic theory through a review of recent work in the field of semiotics. Content and formal schemata are shown to be grounded respectively in perceptual (abductive) and indexical (inductive) strategies of inference. A third kind of schemata is based on deductive generalization and referred to as abstract schemata. All…

Writing teachers need to recognize the special circumstances of culturally displaced students. A specific category of such students are those from the Asian subcontinent, who are not exactly non-native speakers of English, but who do speak non-standard American English. These students occupy a subaltern (marginal) position: they can neither be…

Common problems encountered in teaching Chinese that involve classical, intentional malapropisms (learned errors) are discussed. Three aspects unique to Chinese are addressed: (1) since Chinese writing is logographic, some malapropisms occur because of similar graphs; (2) since many expressions come from classical Chinese, and instruction in…

Noting that intercultural understanding is a prime construct in the study of intercultural communication, this paper examines two questions that confront all intercultural communication researchers: (1) What are the underlying characteristics of intercultural understanding? and (2) What constitutes an interpretative perspective to intercultural…

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

The survey questionnaire and a description of the coding system used for analyzing the data collected in a survey of Cherokee language and education are presented. The survey was designed to study language use, bilingualism, and education in the Cherokee community. The survey encompassed 198 Cherokee children between the ages of 5 and 14 who…

Points out some of the connections which the study of sexism in language has with other problems in linguistics, cites examples of sexism in English, and argues that sexist uses of language need further systematic study. (RB)

This article is a qualitative sociolinguistic profile of the present language situation in Nigeria. The home, the government, religion, holidays and leisure activities, education, work, the market, clubs, and mass media are described in their relation to language types and functions. (SCC)

This article discusses the interactive behavior that accompanies verbal exchange. It specifically describes a set of experiments designed to isolate an important subset of interactive behavior, the vocal (as opposed to the verbal) and to relate this information to a wide range of social impressions resulting from verbal exchange. (Available from…

An analysis is made of three "wh" words -- what, which, and who -- which are most frequently used as interrogative and relative pronouns in English. An attempt is made to find some formal syntactic markers distinguishing these two uses and consequently to postulate distinct feature matrices for them. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (Author/RM)

Current work in American dialectology is summarized and commented on. (Available from: See FL 508 214.) (RM)

Pragmatic factors necessary to the understanding of colloquial expressions are called here "simpragma." Some examples are provided. (Text is in Spanish.) (DS)

The author maintains that sexism is at work in everyday speech, including professional jargon, and that social workers should be concerned with and aware of this issue. (HMV)