This study investigated whether "avoidance" is an appropriate term to describe the linguistic behavior in which the learner with a particular first-language (L1) background tries to underproduce or underrepresent a particular second-language (L2) structure. The first section seeks to establish the general psycholinguistic principle that…

The distinctive features of narratives told by Asians, particularly Japanese, who are non-native speakers of English and residing in the United States are analyzed. Focus is on the narrative structure produced and the communication problems occurring due to cultural traits, particularly as they differ from North American norms. Educational and…

This book is designed to provide practical advice to parents and educators on the language acquisition process. Citing numerous case studies and anecdotal examples, it explains how children learn to talk and acquire language. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to language acquisition, explaining the components, forms, and structure of language.…

This paper describes a coding system devised to analyze conversations of graduate students in applied linguistics at Edinburgh University. The system was devised to test the hypothesis that as shared knowledge among conversation participants grows, the textual density of in-group members has more cues than that of strangers. The informal…

A study investigated the oral and written language used in college student groups working on draft revisions. Subjects were 19 freshmen in a composition class. Data were gathered in two speech situations: (1) students and instructor engaged in revision; and (2) a three-student peer group revision session with no teacher present. The use of…

A study explored alternative ways of collecting data on cultural values as expressed in speech behaviors. It investigated perceptions of the use of compliments in American English interactions by five Japanese and five American women. Methods of data collection included, first, a questionnaire and then for comparison, interviews using items from…

A discussion of some occurrences of metaphor in Modern Greek is intended to offer insight to foreign language teachers on the handling of the phenomenon in classroom instruction. Some implications for machine translation are also suggested. First, a brief theoretical account of metaphor points out that metaphor occurs in nearly all discourse and…

The volume represents in microcosm the sort of faculty-trainee-student interaction that is a priority at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) at the University of North Dakota. Seven studies by faculty and students of SIL include the following: "Lexical Variation in Mexican Sign Language" (J. Albert Bickford); "Reflexives in…

Communities of one sort or another are found in the literature of many disciplines and are used to explain any number of things: linguists examine language in terms of speech communities, while composition researchers write of discourse communities. Linguists have advanced various definitions of communities, but Stanley Fish's "Is There a…

Certain word-order patterns are more basic and less marked than others. The more strongly marked a pattern seems to be in isolation, the stronger must be the contextual forces motivating its use, if it is to seem natural in a text. Various topicalizations (of adverbials, objects, and parts of verb phrases, for example) need various degrees of…

A study of the functions and structure of referential third- person pronominal chains in spontaneous English conversation as compared to those in written English is discussed. The study found the frequencies of these pronouns and of their chains to be generally much higher in the spoken corpus than in the written corpus. In the spoken corpus,…

This workbook in French grammar, intended for American college students, provides instruction and practice in French morphology, syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and language style at the intermediate level. It is also designed to increase or reinforce the students' understanding of English grammar, based on the assumption that American students…

Formulaic speech, expressions learned as unanalyzed wholes and used on particular occasions by native speakers, is contrasted to "grammatical" sentences using novel combinations of words in the second language classroom. The speech produced by three limited English-speaking children in an English program suggests that formulaic speech…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 31 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the rhetoric of confrontation in Northern Ireland; (2) rhetorical arguments in public health regulations; (3) epideictic discourse in the founding of the…

A study focused on the nature and effect of constraints on the hypotheses that learners make about the meanings of words. Two experiments were conducted at a large midwestern university: the first, involving 68 undergraduate students divided randomly into two groups, tested taxonomic and durative constraints on nouns, and time of day and cessation…