Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students' vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may,…

This article addresses the question of how second language (L2) learners understand idiomatic expressions in their second/foreign language and advances the proposition that literal meanings of idiom constituents enjoy processing priority over their figurative interpretations. This suggestion forms the core of the literal-salience resonant model of…

Papers from a conference on cartography in geolinguistics include: "The Political Importance of Visualisation of Language Contact" (Yvo J. D. Peeters); "Some Considerations on People and Boundaries" (Guy Heraud); "Geolinguistic Developments and Cartographic Problems" (Colin H. Williams, John E. Ambrose); "A…

Language can both reflect and shape the way people are treated in today's society. It can be used to open doors when it is gender inclusive, or to create barriers when it is not. The goal of this booklet is to encourage gender-inclusive language. Bias-free language is effective language. A number of studies demonstrate that an audience is more…

The discussion of Nweh, a Bantu language, focuses on a group of adjectives that can occur in positions where one would expect a noun, and which appear to enter noun classification. Specifically, the reasons that these adjectives have noun properties and that the pronominal class marker for the adjective is invariant are investigated. First, the…

An analysis of the polysemic nature of prepositions in pidgins and creoles (PCs) looks at the analytic nature of PCs and the pervasive variability in their grammars, and then focuses on usage of the preposition "fo" in Anglo-Nigerian Pidgin (ANP), likely borrowed from the English "for." It is argued that while this is not the…

A sociolinguistic analysis of English loan words in use in the 1990s in the discourse of young Japanese people is presented. The study drew data from a 1993 survey of undergraduate students at two Osaka (Japan) higher education institutions, one for men and one for women, which asked what loanwords students used and heard often. The report first…

Much earlier controversy surrounding the Chinese "ba" construction stems from dissention over whether or not "ba" has any independent semantic content. "Ba" was assumed either to be a purely formal particle whose function was to assign case, or to have semantic content translating into thematic content. However, under the hypothesis that abstract…

A variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing information about the natural use of natural languages is surveyed, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the properties of a research task that make a given technique more or less suitable to it rather than comparing techniques globally and ranking them absolutely. An initial goal is to…

This paper describes how slang is not necessarily short-lived and novel. Users perceive these words, phrases, and meanings as new and they function as new, however, their novelty is only apparent rather than real. Data examined were gathered by students from fellow students at Michigan State University. Sources for comparison included the…

Tone-based classification rules for Igbo nouns need modification because: (1) class 1 nouns (monosyllables with high tones) do not, as claimed, operate differently from other terminal high-tone nouns; and (2) class 6 nouns (di-syllabic with downstep tones) can be accounted for within class 2 and class 3 nouns known as HH and LH nouns). The proper…

This word list is designed for students of Yup'ik Eskimo to assist them in choosing the appropriate word when there are several Yup'ik words that correspond to a single English word. This alphabetical list contains 77 English words that might cause confusion, and includes simple examples of usage to clarify the meanings of the various…

The dictionary, intended primarily for teachers and students of phonetics, contains almost 2,000 terms used in the field of phonetics. Areas covered include articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual phonetics, classical and generative phonology, distinctive features, the phonology of English, and phonological change and variation. Terminology is…

Locative inversion, one aspect of word order in English discourse in which the positions of verb and noun phrase are inverted (e.g., "in front of the house is a tree"), is examined. It is argued that inversions after deictic adverbs and those after non-deictic, locative constituents are related, both representing devices: (1) expressing point of…

The concept of gender in language encompasses three ideas: (1) sex, or classification as masculine, feminine, or neuter; (2) epicene, a proform (substitute word) whose referent is masculine or feminine; and (3) ecology, the relationship between organisms and their environment. Gender classification in language indicates that original speakers of…