Analyzes the use and distribution of the adverbs "almost" and "nearly" based on the LOB corpus, data compiled at the universities of Lancaster (England), Oslo (Norway), and Bergen (Norway) between 1970 and 1978. (six references) (CFM)

Examines phatic processes in elderly people's response to the question "How are you?" as "negotiation" following the conversation analysis tradition of research on greetings and troubles-telling, rather than as conventionalized and desemanticized discourse. Implications for gerontological and medical research of discourse…

Study looks at frequency of noun1 + de + noun2 possessive in French prose. Researchers used chi-square and Pearson test to analyze results of syntagmatic possessive construction in works by Hugo, Stendahl, Balzac, Zola, Gide, Malraux, St. Exupery, and Sartre. Findings indicate that syntagmatic genitive possessive is more commonly found in…

Presents four principles for archive-based language research: maximum readability and minimum bias; consistent encoding for exhaustive computer search; systematic contrastiveness; and data comparability in elicitation, transcription and coding. Examples from existing computer archives illustrate these and other principles, and strategies are…

Some instances of linguistic development in second-language acquisition are examined that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. Some evidence is drawn from data on the acquisition of Italian. Implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research are discussed. (61 references) (Author/LB)

Explores the role of Connected Speech Processes (CSP) in accounting for sociolinguistically significant dimensions of speech variation, and presents initial findings on the distribution of CSPs in the speech of Australian adolescents. The data were gathered as part of a wider survey of speech of Brisbane school children. (Contains 26 references.)…

Discusses the kind of rhetorical questions that convey opposite assertive meanings, as in "who cares?" which imparts the meaning of nobody cares. For Chinese learning, rhetorical questions usually carry extra attitudinal meanings that their equivalent declaratives may not have. (Contains 13 references.) (JP)

Although both Chinese and Japanese allow resultative compounds of the form V/cause-V/result, Japanese resultative compounds do not show the semantic ambiguities seen in Chinese compounds. An argument that three factors explain this difference supports the claim that many differences among languages can be accounted for with universal principles…

Finds that zero quotatives (where direct speech is reported with neither a reporting verb nor an attributed speaker) are found when a speaker is clearly constructing attitude; where the omission of a quotative may serve some dramatic effect; and at sights where conversational partners are displaying strongly convergent behavior. (SR)

Presents a theory of phonological adjacency requirements. Locality theory is defined by a universal locality condition, which requires elements to be within a plane, the adjacency parameter, which in turn allows rules to impose further constraints on the maximal distance between interacting segments, and by transplanar locality, which bans certain…

Suggests that two components of natural discourse (pragmatic information and knowledge about discourse style) play a role in memory for the surface form of sentences in discourse. Shows that recognition memory increased as a function of information about the speaker's positive and negative attitudes and that substantial verbatim memory was…

Describes "need" as a semiauxiliary and marginal modal and as a full lexical verb in present-day British English from the syntactic, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic points of view. The descriptions given by grammars as well as examples in British-English texts are compared. (14 references) (Author/CFM)

Summarizes and comments on two recent books, one by Birgit Harley and the other by David Singleton, that review the language research carried out to determine the importance of age in learning a second language. (CFM)

Explores trends in text linguistics related to the diverse scope of applied linguistics. A 26-citation annotated and a larger unannotated bibliography are included. (CB)

Reviews the contribution of ethnographic research to discourse analysis, focusing on discourse practices as a reflection of cultural context; educational applications and the discontinuity issue; literacy as a focus of discourse-oriented ethnographic research; and implications for applied linguistics. A 9-citation annotated and a 50-citation…