An analysis of verbs in Tlingit, a U.S. Northwest Coast Indian language, begins with an overview of its situation and usage and of previous research. The second chapter sketches its phonological and syntactic characteristics. Subsequent chapters deal specifically with the verb. An analysis of verb categories distinguishes two groups: argumental…

An ethnographic and linguistic study conducted at a high-technology corporation examined decision-making in managerial meetings, focusing on the effects of silences following a proposal on the maker of the proposal. An opinion is that such silences signify a negative evaluation of the proposal, inviting the proposal maker to alter his position.…

This essay provides teachers and others with an awareness of the social and political implications of words used to designate indigenous peoples of North America. How a group is seen by others and how it sees itself in many ways define the conditions under which the group will live, and the options it can exercise to affect these conditions. The…

A study compared (1) data on rejections of advice by native and non-native speakers collected from natural conversation with (2) data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT). Subjects were students in an academic advising session (13 native speakers, 11 non-native speakers of English) who responded to a DCT and students (18 native…

This conference presentation is offered as a prolegomenon, or introduction, to a paper and research project. The issues of whether prolegomena are modernist explanatory devices and whether postmodern prolegomena are possible are discussed. The paper proposes a research inquiry into "postmodern teaching" initiated through the metaphor of…

This paper presents two case studies that analyze how associate teachers and high school student teachers participate in post-lesson annual meetings evaluating what the student teacher does in the classroom. Semantic scripts are used to get to the heart of the meaning of "evaluate," and evaluation as a cultural activity is emphasized.…

This paper examines the initiation and implementation of a broad-based outreach program at Michigan State University (MSU), focusing on faculty and staff reaction to the program. The MSU program involved the reconceptualization of university outreach, defining it as a form of scholarship that cuts across teaching, research, and service and is…

This study compared the effects of instructor-provided vs. learner-generated analyses of semantic relationships between major concepts on structural knowledge acquisition in an introductory psychology course. One group explained the relationships on instructor-provided graphic organizers; the other group classified relationships between concepts…

While native and non-native English-speakers may approach scientific English differently, the same features cause difficulty for both groups. The difficulties generally occur more with grammar and the complex relationships between terms than with vocabularly, and may be classified in seven categories: interlocking definitions, technical…

This review of the literature looks at writing disabilities in the context of special education services provided within regular classrooms. A definition of learning disabilities as well as a discussion of effects of left and right brain dominance and of the steps of the writing process begin the paper. Among the findings of the research synthesis…

Different learning strategies that are used by field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) people in a hypermedia-assisted instructional setting were studied with 63 international college students for whom English was a second language. The treatment was a semantic network-based hypermedia-assisted language-learning environment to help…

The working papers by students and professors of linguistics on research in progress include the following: "Are Cariban Languages Moving Away From or Towards Ergative Systems?" (Desmond D. Derbyshire); "A Double-Verb Construction in Mbya Guarani" (Robert A. Dooley); "Semantically Ergative Languages in Typological…

An analysis of languages with multiple fronting of WH words (who, what, whom, etc.) looks in detail at Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian (Slavic languages), and Romanian (a Romance language). In spite of their superficial similarity, the Slavic and East European languages that normally put all WH words at the beginning of clauses fall into…

Extracts from financial reports broadcast on two British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio channels are analyzed for cognitive structures that affect the conceptual organization of this discourse type. The approach used for the analysis is based on two assumptions in the relationship of communication and cognition. These are: (1) financial…

The study reported in this paper investigated second language learners' ability to analyze new words without the use of context clues. The study focused on how confidence and accuracy increase or decrease with prior knowledge of a language and how availability of reading strategies can affect confidence or accuracy. Three groups of graduate…