"Northern minorities" is an official term for 26 indigenous peoples who live in a vast northern and Arctic territory (58% of the new Russia, mostly Siberia). These peoples include very different ethnic groups with different cultures and languages, but today they all live in a situation best described as "ethnic catastrophe."…

A study, based on a single sociolinguistic interview conducted in French in Canada, analyzed language patterns typical of daily interaction, particularly that found in argumentation. It is found that speakers show a natural ability to use reasoning and processes to construct an argument adapted to the particular communication situation. Such an…

This book provides an overview of the history, present circumstances, and future prospects of the native languages of Quebec: Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Inuktitut, Micmac, Mohawk, Montagnais, and Naskapi. Chapter 1, "The Situation of Aboriginal Languages in the Americas" (Jacques Maurais), discusses the linguistic demography of…

English nominalizations turn verbs and adjectives into nouns systematically, but their meanings can change unpredictably. In the United States, college composition handbooks urge students to avoid using nominalizations, but elsewhere secondary students learn to write them responsibly and to recognize being manipulated when reading them.…

Choice of second-person pronouns can help explain the intersection of language, personality, and culture. Changes in modern Norway are described in which the polite forms "de,""dem"/"dykk," and "deres"/"dykkar" have been replaced in all except commercial, government, or ultra-polite speech by the…

Section A of the Journalism History section of the proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "Mixed Messages in a Progressive Newspaper: The Milwaukee Journal and Woman Suffrage, 1911-1912" (Elizabeth Burt); "The Search for Unity: The Importance of the Black Press in the Emigration/Colonization Issues of the 1800s" (Bernell…

Many linguists, sociologists, and educators see the nonstandard form of speech used by African-American students as a substandard, imperfect copy of Standard English (SE), marred by a number of careless and ignorant errors, rather than as something to be studied and understood in its own right. Many African-American college students continue to…

Examples are given of real lexical errors made by learner writers, and consideration is given to the way in which three learners' dictionaries could deal with the lexical items that were misused. The dictionaries were the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English," and the "Chambers Universal Learners'…

This paper examines the Turkish origins of a number of Cypriot-Greek words, explaining how some of these words have undergone a semantic shift. Words of Turkish origin can be divided into three classes: (1) culturally borrowed, those words that introduced a new concept into Cypriot-Greek and have no purely Greek equivalent; (2) doublets, those…

Concepts that deal with various aspects of communicative success, or "success concepts," include grammaticality, acceptability, appropriateness, and interpretability. Because different grammarians espouse different ideas of correctness, grammaticality, defined as the relation between an utterance and a grammatical description of its language, must…

This research originated with the idea that a relationship exists between the culture-specific way of thinking on the one hand and the use of language in special contexts on the other, affecting both meaning and text structure. The goal of the research is to create an interlingual text corpus representing a special type of text that appears in…

A Chinese student of English is often faced with culturally based differences in denotation and connotation, idioms and proverbs, habits, and formulaic use of language. Since the native speaker of any language has built into his language repertoire his unique cultural assumptions and values, a culture-oriented curriculum in language teaching is…

The language use and interactions of limited English proficient Chinese American first graders and their two teachers were analyzed. One teacher was bilingual; the other was not. The study consisted of three phases: identification of speech events, recording and analysis of speech acts during teacher-directed lessons, and followup of target…

Recognition of gender as a significant factor in the social parameters of language is a very recent phenomonon. The external aspects of language as they relate to sexism have social and political ramifications. Using Peirce's definition of sign, which encompasses the representation, the object, and its interpretation, sexually stereotypic language…

Reports on the role of English and English instruction in 10 countries are updated. Recent developments in literature instruction are reported for Austria, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Tunisia. Among the topics summarized are the role of English instruction in the educational systems of…