This is a reflection on certain aspects of sociolinguistic and linguistic problems of French in West Africa, particularly in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. The sociolinguistic section discusses the role French has played in Africa and still plays vis-a-vis African languages and English. Conditions in which French is used and attitudes both of…

Research indicates that first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition involve some of the same processes, yet L2 learners apparently acquire the structures of the target language in a systematic way by passing through a sequence of developmental stages. This study shows that in the earliest stages of syntactic development the L2 learner's…

THE AUTHOR CHARACTERIZES THIS BULLETIN AS A MESSAGE ON LANGUAGE. THE MESSAGE IS FACILITATED BY (1) A FLUID AND IMAGINATIVE USE OF TYPESETTING, (2) A NARRATIVE-FORM STORY, AND (3) A STORY-PLOT THAT INVOLVES SEVERAL LANGUAGE PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS. ALTHOUGH THE STORY COMPRISES THE ENTIRE BULLETIN, THE PURPOSE OF THE BULLETIN IS NOT JUST TO TELL A…

TO DISPEL THE MYSTERIES SURROUNDING LINGUISTICS, ENGLISH TEACHERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND CERTAIN FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE AS THEY ARE PERCEIVED BY THE LINGUIST. THE LINGUIST SEES LANGUAGE AS "A SYSTEM OF PATTERNED VOCAL BEHAVIOR BY MEANS OF WHICH MEN COOPERATE IN SOCIETY." BY USING RIGOROUS SCIENTIFIC METHODS, HE STUDIES REPRESENTATIVE AND AUTHENTIC…

The papers in this document represent preliminary results of a study which is part of a 3-year project being conducted by the Educational Testing Service in cooperation with the New York City Board of Education, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This document is divided into seven sections: (1) Introduction, (2)…

This book discusses some of the functions, ends, or goals that language serves in religion; the various kinds of linguistic resources that are exploited; and some of the social processes that characterize the use of language. In section one, "Performance," three approaches to the description of verbal behavior are contrasted. This…

An interactionist-discovery theory of child phonology is proposed based on the following tenets: children invent their own phonological rules, and phonetic mastery is not automatically or generally in step with learning about phonemic contrasts. When a child learns the sound pattern of a language, there is constant interaction between the…

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

Up to the present, no studies have been done in the area of child language in Mexico. The Center of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the Colegio de Mexico carried out an empirical investigation of the language of six- to seven-year-old Mexican children. This paper presents, in preliminary form, some partial results of the investigation,…

The dialect of English as spoken by native Puerto Rican Spanish speakers is estensively influenced by interference from the speakers' native language. Since exposure to a language affects one's ability to use it, the speaker's position might affect his access to English and/or his willingness to speak it, and, therefore, his proficiency in it. It…

An extreme view of language acquisition sees base structures as innate, and acquisition of the grammar of a particular language as a process of learning the transformation rules needed to get from base structures to surface structures of adult native speakers. Base structures are understood to most resemble simple-active-affirmative-declarative…

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains seven articles. They are: "The Use of Contrastive and Error Analysis to Practicing Teachers," by Rudolf Filipovic; "Some Problems in Teaching English Noun Phrases as Subject to Serbo-Croatian Speakers,""Problems in Teaching the Structure of Some English Noun…

This study investigates and determines how the processes involved in language acculturation and socialization become interrelated in the linguistic, cultural, and social development of white, Italian-American monolingual and bilingual children of working class parents in Boston's North End. This sociolinguistic study deals particularly with the…

A review of the literature on Black English was made to determine what information is available and to assess the credibility of the information. The review covered the years from 1865 through the first half of 1975. More than 75 documents were identified as potentially informative in the area of investigation. The linguistic features of Black…

This study was conducted to find and collocate the semantically equivalent form patterns of the English and Hungarian relation-marking systems by contrasting the use of the individual relational morphemes. The ultimate aim of the study is to determine interlingual congruences and contrasts for possible use in language teaching. The investigation…