This collection of twenty-seven short readings is intended to augment the readings in the authors' previous work, "Literary Sinhala" (1974). These selections are intended to serve as further exemplification of the grammatical material in that text. The selections here are mostly contemporary prose in several styles, ranging from fiction…

This study is divided into two sections: the first examines Standard French indirect interrogation, noting several distinct verb classes which are discussed in terms of permutations of WH-words, reduction, multiple WH-words, cleavage, semantic compatibility, and the "que-" completive; the second part focuses on indirect interrogation and…

Indian English is a variety of the English language used as a second language by Indian bilinguals. This paper reports on a computerized survey of the grammar of Indian English, consisting of the classification of 230 expressions "of whose standing there might be some question" by a group of linguists and teachers of English in India, in…

This paper discusses difficulties in defining Standard American English, and the question of whether there is a need to define it. Several theories on why such a dialect should be defined are described. These are: the "propriety" theory, the "psychological" theory, the "power and prestige" theory, and the "better tool" theory, the "psychological"…

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

The present volume (originally published in German under the title "Einfuhrung in Problematik und Methodik der Sprachwissenschaft" by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen, in 1943) contains a "clear, elegant and non-technical introduction into some of the fundamental problems of general linguistics, enlivened by numerous examples, mainly from the Romance…

There are three areas of interest in the topic of sociolinguistics in the classroom. First, the study of sociolinguistics is the interest of the professional linguist; second, the application of sociolinguistic principles is or should be the concern of all professional people who care about what goes on in the classroom, especially the teacher;…

The English speaker learning French tends to interpret the sound characteristics of the second language according to English conventions. The term "sound characteristics" as used here refers to the phonetic aspects, the rhythm, and the intonation of French. A number of examples are given to support the theory that insufficient knowledge of these…

Personal satisfaction or enjoyment can be obtained from participation in the persuasive or informative processes of public discourse, partially because both are serious methods of attaining socially useful goals. The public speaker is challenged by the opportunity to raise his audience's level of information about a subject and to influence their…

"The Hope Chest," a short story by Jean Stafford, offers a challenge to the oral interpreter of literature because it demands that the performer demonstrate its complex narrative levels. There are five distinct facets in the personality of the central character, Miss Bellamy: a lonely, fearful old lady; a shrewd, hospitable mistress of…

Part of the Oregon Elementary English Project, this unit focuses on variation in language. Consisting of fourteen individual lessons, the unit begins with a series of lessons whose purpose is to develop students' ability to recognize ways in which objects belonging to the same set may differ. These lessons serve as preparation for observing the…

Roger Shuy and Ralph Fasold's introduction describing sociolinguistics as (1) a desire to refine linguistic theory, (2) an attempt to describe the sociocultural matrices of language, and (3) an effort to apply sociolinguistic knowledge to this monograph. Walt Wolfram contributes substantially to the development of sociolinguistics theory in…

This collection of studies is divided into four parts. Part one is concerned with aspects of maternal communication as it relates to regulative and instructional contexts. Part two focuses on aspects of the speech of five year olds, with Hawkins examining choices within the nominal group, Turner and Pickvance examining expressions of uncertainty…

This paper presents a linguistic discussion of play-languages--designated as ludlings by the author and tentatively defined as the result of a transformation or a series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form, but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or…

The underlying premise in this collection of readings is that persuasion exists in all communications. When people interact, persuasion is one of the catalysts--the communicator seeks to alter the probabilities of the receiver's responses in ways the communicator can predict and in ways that permit the communicator to reap rewards from his…