All modern Romance languages except Rumanian have a class of causative + infinitive construction in which the infinitive subject surfaces as an agentive. This article investigates the question of how agentivization of the infinitive subject is to be handled in these languages. (DS)

A cloze procedure test presents a written passage in which every fifth word is deleted. The student must fill in the blanks with the words originally used in the passage. This article discusses the usefulness of the procedure as a diagnostic tool and for evaluating the suitability of instructional materials. (GC)

Charts the evolution of the black voice in American literature into a self-sufficient, independent literary language. (GW)

Forty-eight Black children, ages 4 to 9 years, who utilized features of Black English in their oral language, participated in a study which investigated selected linguistic features believed to be a function of age among children. (Author/MH)

An analysis of differences in lexical usage among children of different socio-cultural milieux. This study uses other sociological and linguistic studies. It includes twenty-three tables, and presents in conclusion the results obtained, differentiation of the groups and the problems posed by isolation of only one variable. (Text is in French.)…

A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners (native speakers of Arabic and of Spanish and Portuguese) in accordance with contrastive analysis difficulty predictions. An avoidance pattern was found in accordance with such predictions. (CHK)

Asserts that quantitative analysis facilitates the linguistic study of variability in language. The implications of such study for education are in the areas of individual diagnosis and placement. Quantitative analysis is less comfortable to linguists when it is used to generalize or obscure linguistic differences. The latter seems to be the more…

The essence of translation lies in the preservation of semantic, pragmatic and textual meaning across two languages. The model proposed considers the following: situational dimensions; dimensional errors; the distinction between overt and covert translation; application of cultural filters; social role relationships; and the purpose for the…

An evaluation study indicated that teachers differentiated standard American English from three marked varieties, with Hispanicized English rated more favorably than ungrammatical English and code switching. Four varieties of Spanish were differentiated on standard language continuum, with code switching the least acceptable. (CB)

Rated speech phrasality scores of 40 deaf students (ages 4-17) were correlated to their reading comprehension scores according to four oral word groupings: whole sentences, phrases, nonmeaningful fragmented word groups, and single words. Among results was phrasal speaker superiority in comprehending phrased material in response to factual (not…

Four hypotheses explaining the origin of Berbice Dutch, a Dutch-based Creole language spoken in the county of Berbice in Guyana, are explored. The most likely explanation is that the language was first spoken by Berbice slaves as a means of expressing the identity of a newly created "ethnic" group. (Author/CB)

A morphological analysis of a French language corpus focuses on patterns of truncation, shortened versions of multisyllabic words, in modern spoken usage and in the language used in newspapers. Specific examples of truncation are included.(MSE)

Describes a study that attempts to systematize the criteria required for accurate translations of technical documents. The results of a Linguistic Appreciation Questionnaire-Test, administered to 19 professional translators, were used to categorize the most common translation variables: style, structure, rhythm, and meaning of text in the hope of…

Presents checklists of the more common grammatical patterns in spoken Mandarin for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. Most of the patterns include an example with an English gloss. (Author/LMO)

Tonal "flip-flop" (reversal of pitch value in which a direct exchange of value between two items is necessarily involved) can be found in a significant number of modern Chinese dialects, where an opposite pitch pattern is observed for the traditional Yin/Yang dichotomy of tones. (Author/CB)