IN THIS PAPER THE AUTHOR IS PRESENTING AN OVERVIEW OF CURRENT RESEARCH, BOTH IN THE FIELD OF LINGUISTICS AND IN OTHER FIELDS, ON THE LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MEANING. THE MAJOR TOPICS DISCUSSED INCLUDE--(1) CULTURAL COMPENTENCE (LANGUE AND PAROLE, CO-EXISTING COMPETENCES), (2) DOMAINS AND ROLE RELATIONS, (3) SPEECH FUNCTIONS,…

A forced-choice paired-comparison test containing 252 items was presented to eight subjects. Each item consisted of two geometric figures chosen systematically from a sample of four ellipses and four triangles. The subjects (six female and two male adults who spoke only English) were asked to decide which of the two figures went best with a…

This Handbook was compiled for the 43rd Linguistic Society of America Meeting in New York, December 28-30, 1968. It consists of the official program for the meeting, abstracts of 98 of the papers presented there, and advertisements. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order by author. , and in some cases are accompanied by handouts. (JD)

A group of 19 subjects was exposed to a verbal passage for learning that contained associatively related words, while a second group of 19 subjects was exposed to the identical passage but with high association (HA) words replaced by low association (LA) words. A written prompted recall test followed presentation. Group HA had as prompts all of…

The author proposes his theory on language learning: "...children learn pitch, stress, and juncture along with the more individual voice patterns which we might call tone, much earlier and more easily than they learn segmental phonemes and morphemes." This theory, which the author feels gains some confirmation from the learning processes of…

A distinction is drawn between pragmatic and semantic meaning and a supporting discussion is presented. The hypothesis is then stated, that there are cases where semantic meaning of an utterance is learned as an abstraction from pragmatic meaning. Data from two experiments on a group of 63 preschool children are presented which provide empirical…

The experiment reported in this document extended the study by Milburn and Bell (1969) of English word frequencies. Specifically, this experiment examined the influence of instructional set on the relationship between affect and frequency estimates, with a distinction between personal and nationwide norms. The experiment design provided for two…

The two purposes of this study were to analyze the linguistic studies of the speech of black Americans which began in 1865 and ended in 1972 and to determine, on the basis of the studies analyzed, whether or not a black dialect exists. First, 73 studies were read and analyzed; second, these studies were categorized according to the investigators'…

This document reviews some of the indices of language development which have been constructed since the Anderson study of 1937. In addition to the findings of Anderson, the T-unit proposed by Hunt (1965), the measure of T-unit length and mean number of sentence-combining transformations per T-unit developed by O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris…

This study was undertaken to provide a descriptive analysis of the rhetoric of physicians (1) as they communicate with their colleagues, and (2) as they communicate with their patients. To accomplish the first objective, the oral presentations made during weekly conferences by the surgeons at a major hospital were observed for ten months. The…

One of the first problems concerning research in the languages of Oceania is that the number and location of languages there is not precisely known. Another problem is determining just what a language is. Appell's "isoglot" may be a better method of distinguishing different languages than "mutual intelligibility." The Oceanic…

This volume comprises a listing of languages of the world with reference to their Bible translation needs. The compilers, the Wycliffe Bible translators, stipulate that the list is not complete or error-free, but that it contains more information than any other list known to them, and it may be checked as they have provided the source and date of…

The present study is a pilot phonemic analysis which attempts primarily to establish an inventory of phonemic contrasts in Bemba. Also referred to as Chibemba, the term Bemba is used to cover several regional variants of the language. (The variant examined in this study is known as "Central Bemba," spoken in the Kasama District and contiguous…

This interim report on 1 project at the Berkeley Center for Research and Development in Higher Education deals with the construction of a theoretical model of the curricular-instructional subsystem. The relationship between student unrest and the poor quality of education in American colleges has long been evident to educational researchers. The…

The present work deals with Africanistic problems, raising questions of interest for general linguists, and linguists working in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, and other special branches. The first two chapters deal with the field and difficulties of African studies and the general characterization of the African languages. Following chapters discuss…