Forty-five papers on linguistic theory and language research from the annual conference address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; agreement languages; grammatical relations; syntax; phonology; grammar; contrastive linguistics; second language learning; syntax; quotations; topic management; aphasia; interpersonal communication; laughter; morphology; lexicon; lexico-semantics; language contact and linguistic borrowing; the language of science fiction; character creation in literature; phoneme-grapheme patterns; bimodal communication; suprasegmentals; and semiotics. Languages studied include English, Chinese, Spanish, Latin, French, Russian, African American Vernacular English, Arabic, and Mixtec. Selected papers include: (1) "Salience Schemes for Narrative Discourse; Some Broader Concerns" (Longacre); (2) "Requiem for LACUS 1995: A Poem" (Longacre); (3) "Agreement Languages" (Lehmann); (4) "How Grammatic Relations Are Determined" (Oller); (5) "Divergence or Convergence: A Syntactic and Phonological Study of Aave in 'Middletown'" (Huang); (6) "Cognitive Strategies for Expression of the Copula: A Crosslinguistic Approach" (Katz); (7) "Cross-Cultural Factors in ESL Reading: The Relevance of Relevance Theory" (Shi); (8) "Syntactic Specification of Morphological Categories: Government Versus Determination" (Lockwood); (9) "Discourse Structure and Communicative Power" (Malcolm); (10) "Japanese and Korean Basic Color Terms" (Ishii); (11) "Language: A View from the Ranks of Science Fiction Fandom" (Stanford); (12) Pitch and Vowel Reduction/Centralization" (Griffen); and (13) "Renaming the Baltimore Oriole: Another Kind of 'Correctness'" (Levin). (MSE)