This ethnographic study traces the language and literacy attitudes, perceptions, and practices of three generations of indigenous Chamorro women in modern Guam. Through the lens of postcolonial theory, cultural literacy, intergenerational transmission theory, community of practice, and language and identity, this study examines how literacy is…

This authentic threat asserts impending fatal injury. Because of the dangerous nature of threats, investigators must immediately ask: Is the intent real? Is the threatener likely to act? With real lives at risk, using the linguistic information available to answer these questions quickly and accurately is of great importance. Yet, because most…

This dissertation examines the palatalization of consonants in historic and living dialects of three West-Germanic languages: Dutch, German, and Frisian. Palatalization was a common feature of the West-Germanic phonological system and can be found in some form in all West-Germanic languages of the present. It is argued that the extent of its…

Everyone knows that it's important to talk every day with each child, using the kind of talk that builds language and thinking skills. The phrase MAKE TIME TO TALK is to help child care providers remember things they can do when talking to children to help them learn new vocabulary and how to use language to express their ideas and needs, and that…

A sociolinguistic survey of the sign language used by the deaf communities of Peru was conducted in November and December of 2007. For eight weeks, our survey team visited six deaf communities in the cities of Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Iquitos. Using sociolinguistic questionnaires and recorded text testing (RTT) tools, we…

The time has come to create a realistic grammar syllabus in the beginning language courses. Yet why do some in the profession insist that all grammar must be taught in the first year of language learning? Abundant data from decades of research on topics such as human memory, chunking, and second language acquisition exist that overwhelmingly…

The literature suggests children with autism use communication primarily for requests and protests, and almost never for information-seeking. This study investigated whether teaching "Where" questions using intrinsic reinforcement procedures would produce the generalized use of the question, and whether concomitant improvements in…

This study explores some specific aspects of compatibility between cognitive models. Robert E. MacLaury's theory of vantages as arrangements of coordinates and Lakoff's concept of radial categories are mutually reinforcing to an analysis of semantic polysemy. Vantage Theory (VT) includes the notions of "zooming in" and "zooming out", allowing…

This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of…

Paris examines texts worn on objects (like clothing or backpacks), delivered over electronic media, and rapped by youth emcees at a multiethnic high school. He argues that these are identity texts, used by young people to express ethnic and linguistic differences. (Contains 2 figures and 7 notes.)

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) examines implicit attitudes through the measurement of response latencies. In this study, the IRAP was used to assess implicit attitudes toward "mainstream" sexual terms (e.g., Kissing) and "BDSM" terms (e.g., Bondage) among individuals reporting BDSM interests and among students who did not…

This article closely examines the bilingual talk emerging from informal discussions among young people attending a bilingual school in Wales. In contrast to the common focus on issues of bilinguals' linguistic competence in the literature, this paper advocates a speaker's perspective and considers bilingualism to be the sedimentation of social and…

Three data sets of primary and secondary interjections were compared: (1) the original interjections written into the text of Jane Austen's (1813/1994) novel "Pride and prejudice"; (2) the interjections read aloud in commercial recordings by six professional readers of the entire text of the novel; (3) the interjections spoken by actresses and…

This article delves into the connections between language as a rule-governed system of communication and music as a means to express subcultural ideologies and satisfy collective needs. By resorting to the morphological analysis of a corpus of names of alternative music artists, the article evinces that language is a manipulable code through which…

Delivering bad news to students, teachers, and parents is not an uncommon occurrence for school psychologists. Skillfully communicating bad news requires sensitivity, thoughtful wording, and an awareness of the potential effect on the recipients. Despite the importance of this skill, school psychology has devoted little attention to what is…