Defines cultural regions of the United States by emphasizing ethnic groups and ethnicity. Ethnic groups are defined by language, race, national origin, and religion. Ethnicity (attitudes and attributes of specific ethnic groups) is measured by voting behavior, state political policies, economic health, and age structure. (Author/DB)

Illustrates how a linguist might approach literary analysis, emphasizing the behaviors of the reader. Discusses four kinds of signals of meaning, including the lexical, the grammatical, the thematic, and the cohesive. (RL)

Two experiments examined Lakoff's suggestion that men and women use different speech styles (women's speech being more polite and less assertive than men's). The effects of undergraduate students' use of three linguistic variables (tag questions, qualifiers, and compound requests) on person perception was tested. (CM)

The need for and development of computer programs using natural or native tongue languages are discussed. Two programs which attempt to use English Script Applier Mechanism (SAM) and Semantic Information Retrieval (SIR) are described. (MK)

The existence of a "literary dialect" was postulated on several grounds, and specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. (HOD)

Presents a set of rules for learning grammatical gender in French. (AM)

Presents an approach for helping students to explore the auditory level of meaning of a poem in a step-by-step manner. (TJ)

Presents evidence that spoonerisms result from a conflict in word sequencing that carries through to phoneme sequencing, and in the process illustrates the use of some techniques for the experimental elicitation of spoonerisms. (Author/RK)

Describes a study showing how a linguistic pattern of alternation affecting an entire speech community is realized in individual idiolects; an example representative of colloquial Helsinki speech is used. Results support observations already presented by Labov, according to which linguistic change is linguistically structured to a very high…

Reviews linguistic structures in the annual reports of a machine tool manufacturer. Concludes that, as profits decreased and the news became more negative, linguistic structures (including verb structures, thematic structures, context and cohesion, and condensations) suggested a factual, "objective" situation caused by circumstances not…

Analysis of French-spoken constructions in which the superlative begins the utterance, rather than occurring within the sentence, suggests that instead of being variants of standard usage, these constructions leave substantial room for interpretation of syntactic relationships. (Author/MSE)

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…

Argues for the importance of phonological form in the second language (L2) classroom, proposing that a thorough grounding in L2 phonological patterns is essential for language learners. Suggests the importance of phonological information for the auditory detection of morphological form in French. (Author/VWL)

Analysis of the quantitative metrical verse of French Renaissance poet Jean-Antoine de Baif finds that the metrics, often seen as unscannable and using an incomprehensible phonetic orthography, derive largely from a system that is accentual, with the orthography permitting the poet to encode quantitative distinctions that coincide with the meter.…

Examines Japanese equivalents of the six mental predicates defined as semantic universals in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory, with special attention to syntax and semantics of complementation types. It is shown that each primitive predicate has a specific set of syntactic frames for expressing primitive meaning and that extended meanings that…