Earlier sociolinguistic studies distinguish between Standard English and Black English with respect to indirect question formation. Standard English typically does not invert the tense-marker "do" in the imbedded question ("Ask John if he played basketball today") while Black English does ("Ask John did he play basketball today"). In fact, the…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

The author of this paper argues that, in the study of current usage, we need to supplement data from corpus studies by using methods that elicit use, reports of use, and evaluations of use on items which interest them. Ten methods for experimental elicitation of such data are described, related to one another, and illustrated with examples of data…

The possibility is suggested that the meanings of words are abstracted far beyond the range of cognitive concept, and that the role words play in the meaning of sentences is similar to the role phonemes play in the meanings of words. The meanings of the various forms are classed into a single paradigm known as the verb "mot-u" which is one of the…

To secure information relative to the developmental aspects of their meaning system as measured by the semantic differential technique, 154 residential students from the New York State School for the Deaf at Rome, New York were divided into five groups according to age and academic grade level and were administered a semantic differential. It was…

Three different experiments were conducted to examine several variables that influence the recall of prose. In Experiment I a study was made of the influence of differing imagery level nouns as the subject and object of the preposition of a sentence; it also provided a further test of the conceptual peg model, i.e., the concrete-concrete-subject…

This study attempted (1) to determine the ability of children to translate four basic sentence patterns varied according to three levels of structural complexity (single words, clauses, and phrases filling sentence pattern slots), and (2) to determine whether this knowledge is related to their reading comprehension. A test of grammatical structure…

One of the central and defining features of man is language; there can be no deep understanding of man without some understanding of language. Linguistics is the "orderly examination of language in terms appropriate to itself." The central task of linguistics is grammar, the study of the patterning that brings together sounds or symbols with…

The author of this paper presents three arguments (philosophical, empirical, and linguistic) to make his point that the computer, far from being worthless with words, offers the brightest hope for the future management of the verbal processes so important in counseling and guidance. Philosophically, he argues, there is no deep support for bias…

The author begins this paper with, "Let us recognize as axiomatic the statement that sentences in natural languages have the properties of structured, organic wholes." She feels that this statement has several important theoretical consequences, the most interesting (in so far as the current controversy over "surfacism" is…

Sentences in rhetoric texts were used in this study to determine a way in which thetorical syntactic parallelism can be analyzed. A tagmemic analysis determined tagmas which were parallel or identical or similar to one another. These were distinguished from tagmas which were identical because of the syntactic constraints of the language…

The minimum linguistic competence required of an English teacher must be sufficient knowledge to assess continuously the role of direct teaching of linguistics in the classroom; to express, directly or not, views about the nature of language and the structure of English which accord with the best scholarship available; and to counterbalance the…

This study identified reasons to believe that one particular way of teaching writing is theoretically sound; explicated the use theory of meaning; defined a theory of rhetoric which was compatible with the use theory; presented a set of beliefs about the nature of thought and about how the mind learns; and presented exemplary classroom activities…

Magnitude estimation was employed to find the numerical equivalents of 39 expressions of frequency ranging from never to always, and 44 expressions of amount ranging from none to all. The results were generalizable across three age-education-occupation levels and unaffected by whether ratings were an important or unimportant issue. Geometric means…

Based on tape recorded conversations of 28 informants in 18 Louisiana communities, this study investigated regional phonological variants in Louisiana speech. On the basis of settlement history and previous dialect studies, four regions are defined: northern Louisiana, the Florida Parishes, French Louisiana, and New Orleans. The informants are all…