A conference of African scholars was held in the United States in 1979 to develop a consensus and a statement about the direction that African language teaching and learning should take in this decade. African languages are among the so-called "less-commonly taught languages," and funding for their teaching and study has come from…

The functional approach, which views language as a potential for meaning in social situations, seems particularly relevant in analyzing the dynamic interaction between text and context. Function determines structure, and the context, which comes to define the function, determines the kinds of text that will be communicative. As the contextual…

A sociolinguistic analysis of texts is advocated for expanding an oral interpreter's creation of an event from written texts. Two studies are reviewed that suggest that language choices are related to the speaker's purpose, thought processes, role, cultural expectations, and sex. The specific area of study suggested as highly useful for…

Four keynote papers, presented at an international conference on sign language research, discussed general linguistic issues of sign language, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. (CB)

Explores the connections between language, curriculum theory, and social studies. Six language modes--descriptive, explanatory, controlling, legitimating, prescriptive, and affiliative--are defined, and their use in classrooms and social studies curricula discussed. The author suggests that this type of linguistic analysis be used as a basis for…

Proposes a distinction between: (1) social interactional rules as those governing social behavior within social structural contexts and (2) sociolinguistic roles governing the use of resources of spoken and written language within sets of social structural constraints. Also distinguishes between system-specific rules and rules which may be common…

Discusses the process of understanding of intent by which participants, through the comparative interpretation of a series of cues and symbols as they are revealed in speech, develop categories for a contextual model of communication. Argues that discourse is essentially dialogic and phenomenologically realizable. (FL)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985; 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. (20 references) (GLR)

Sociolinguistic analysis of the speech patterns in Spenser's "The Faerie Queen, Book VI" indicated that the socially different characters' language styles did not vary much among themselves or from the narrative, suggesting that the strict verse scheme requirements and a concern for unity of literary style leveled out speech particularities. (CB)

A study investigated the extent of anglicization of Solomon Islands Pijin, the primary language for Honiara, the nation's capital. It was found that the influence of English was not related to the creolization of Pijin but rather to the bilingualism of the speakers of Pijin and to their high degree of fluency and contact with English. (Author/CB)

Focuses on the historical and sociolinguistic studies that illuminate corpus planning processes. These processes are broken down and discussed under two categories: those related to the establishment of norms, referred to as codification, and those related to the extension of the linguistic functions of language, referred to as elaboration. (60…

Explores the masked intentions within Black Guyanese speakers' use of three related types of persuasive discourse, all of which contain elements of insincerity. Analysis of the use and interpretation of grannin, suurin, and koocharin reveal similarities with other genres found in significantly Black populations. (CB)

Critiques the previous article by Torigoe and others (1995) and discusses research on indigenous gestural systems developed by people with deafness and shared with local hearing communities. Poses questions for further research in the field of indigenous gestural communication. (Seven references) (MDM)

Describes the social situations and attitudes of speakers of Dyirbal in addition to changing language identifications, and reports on Dyirbal contract in lexical and grammatical complexity as it has moved toward an inevitable extinction. (11 references) (GLR)

Presents theoretical discussion of the emergence of linguistic features of documents that indicate society is moving toward a view of writing as a form of constitutive social action and of written documents as autonomous material objects having a life of their own. Linguistic features of Anglo-Saxon wills are shown to differ from those of modern…