A study of the extent to which the sequence-of-tenses rule (STR) is used in television news reporting in the United States is presented. The study examines which tenses are shifted most frequently and explains the uses and functions of tense variation. It is argued that STR is not always a semantically and pragmatically unmarked form as proposed…

Efforts to simplify language used in consumer documents come from the consumer movement and a public disillusioned with big business and government. Even before President Carter's 1978 executive order mandating simplification in government regulations, some agencies were revising regulations for clarity. However, these efforts were based on too…

The demonstratives in Napali are outlined, and their operation within the language system is analyzed. Demonstratives in Nepali are words used to refer to places, things, names, and activities. The reference may be endophoric (in which case the referents are in the text) or exophoric (in which case the referents are in the context or situation).…

The verb stem "maka" ("give") in Nahuatl is unusual in its range of options with respect to transitivity. Like all transitive verb stems, it regularly occurs with an object and must do so, but it also appears in an unusually large number of constructions in which it has two objects. These constructions are examined within the…

Analysis of a dialect's phonological change over time compares the vowel systems of individual speakers in 1971 and 1984. Subjects were four speakers of Montreal French. Two were born between 1910 and 1920, and two between 1944 and 1950. One individual in each pair was upper middle class and one was not, and no change of social status occurred…

The research orientations and perspectives of people participating in the international dialogue about the redefinition of English language studies have been varied. Two broad and overlapping areas are distinctive to English studies: the exploration of human values and experience through the study of literature and the media, and the development…

There is significant synchronic evidence of the close relationship between anaphoric and grammatical agreement even within the grammatical structures of a single language. It is possible to predict clear syntactic differences between a grammatical agreement marker and a morphologically incorporated pronoun. What is required is a theory of…

Analysis of data from Kekchi, a head-marking language following Mayan patterns, can provide insight into case relations and pronominal reference in head-marking languages. Tensed verb constructions are examined, focusing attention on how the verb stem can determine both the number of referents and their semantic roles. The language's predication…

A structural analysis provides new evidence concerning the internal structure of the syllable in Wolof, a West African language, through examination of the secret code called Kall, spoken mainly in Senegal's Ceneba area. It is proposed that Kall is better described as involving primarily a reduplication of the prosodic word. The first section…

An analysis of the nature of secondary predicates takes a comparative approach, using Italian and English. Distributional properties and extraction facts are accounted for, and an explanation for the fact that resultatives are not allowed in Romance languages is sought on the basis of Italian evidence. It is argued that the semantic distinction…

An acoustic study of German focused on voice frequency at sentence-, turn-, and discourse-end in conversations. The data were drawn from short dialogues in which the same word occurs at the ends of utterances, in the middle of a turn, at the end of a turn, and at the end of a discourse. The dialogues were read 10 times by a male and a female…

A study examined the applicability of the Ordering Hypothesis to Japanese suffixes. The hypothesis, which claims that affixes that trigger phonological rules (cyclical affixes) do not appear external to affixes that do not, is found to be an inappropriate assumption in Japanese. Examples in English and Chamorro support this finding. It is…

The acquisition of several word formation devices in American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children learning ASL as a native language focused on some devices analogous to word formation devices in spoken languages (compounding, affixation, and derivation) and some in ASL that may not have counterparts in spoken languages. They were examined using…

Rhetorical force can be used to analyze interaction in organizational communication. In such an analysis, force is conceived of as being perceptual, arising out of interaction, aiding in understanding communication patterns, and increasing one's abilities both to anticipate actions and to plan or constrain one's actions. Rhetoric is a product of…

The verb "take" as presented by Langendoen and McCawley is examined in order to prove to the reader that transformational generative grammar suffers from a disregard of empirical fact. (Author/LG)