Explores markedness of languages and language change in relation to their roles in the consistency of language. Concludes typology provides no explanations in itself, but rather through data which need explanations and form a testing ground for linguistic theories. (Author/BK)

This paper presents evidence that English may be a completely caseless language, like Chinese, contrary to the widely held view that distinct pronoun forms and the genitive "'s" involve morphological case. It argues that "I" and "me" are both personal pronouns whereas "my,""mine," and "'s" are possessive pronouns. Contains 31 references. (MDM)

This experiment measured teachers' attitudes towards African American English and Academic English. Participants were graduate students of Education at a college in New York City. They completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that assessed their explicit attitudes towards the two varieties, as well as a Psycholinguistic Experiment that was…

A quantitative method is introduced for detecting and correcting artifactual signal changes in BOLD time series data arising from the magnetic field warping caused by motion of the articulatory apparatus when speaking aloud, with extensions to detection of subvocal articulatory activity during silent reading. Whole-head images allow the large,…

Purpose: The "Lombard effect" describes the tendency for speakers to increase pitch, intensity, and duration in the presence of noise. It is unclear whether these modifications are uniformly applied across all words within an utterance or whether information-bearing content words are further enhanced compared with function words. In the present…

Offers a method for using structural analysis of literature, specifically, students discussed both structure and content within the context of four short stories, thus enriching their understanding of each by way of contrast. (SRT)

This article considers effects of construction frequency, form, function, and prototypicality on second language acquisition (SLA). It investigates these relationships by focusing on naturalistic SLA in the European Science Foundation corpus (Perdue, 1993) of the English verb-argument constructions (VACs): verb locative (VL), verb object locative…

Constructionist approaches to language hypothesize that grammar can be learned from the input using domain-general mechanisms. This emphasis has engendered a great deal of research--exemplified in the present issue--that seeks to illuminate the ways in which input-related factors can both drive and constrain constructional acquisition. In this…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

Two experiments investigated how children (aged 6-8) acquire knowledge of the direct and the indirect object in terms of linguistic marking. The experiments were designed to test the proposition that children should expect a marked linguistic form to be the indirect object. (GO)

Discusses the fact that the basic tendency of structural grammar theory has been to emphasize the principle of formality of description, rather than formality of content. (CK)

This article discusses the relationship between linguistic theory and structuralist philosophy, and explores the possibility of applying structuralist ideas to other human sciences such as anthropology. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Discusses Chomsky's influence in the field of linguistics and concludes that it is part of the branch of psychology and, hence, objective in its analysis of language behavior. (SB)

A rationale for constructing a metalanguage to analyze natural language texts is provided in the context of a long-range program of research, and illustrated by reference to an existing Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS). (JB)