This dissertation investigates Voice Onset Time (VOT), which serves as an essential property for differentiating plosive consonants in L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese. It surveys VOT variations and demonstrates that they are affected by several phonetic and phonological properties, e.g., lexical tone, place of articulation (POA), speech rate,…

While tonal systems have typically been classified as "pitch accent" or "true tonal", there is growing evidence that systems instead have a variety of features which vary across languages, rather than falling into discrete categories. These category labels have been used widely in literature about the languages of New Guinea,…

In this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover…

As an example leading toward a social grammar of language, three emotions are analyzed in English and Yoruba. Certain communication features in English that lie in intonation and stress require a change of grammar in Yoruba and that these changes are subject to further categorization through status and solidarity. (Author/RM)

Discusses main ideas of papers presented that reflect the new directions explored in the field of Chinese linguistics. Current areas of study include tonal distinctions in dialect studies, contrastive analysis of Taiwanese and standard Chinese verb phrase structures, and the application of old Chinese morphological grammar to characteristics of…

This document provides a description of the Chien-yang dialect of Chinese along with a comparative description of the Chien-ou dialect and a discussion of the entire Min dialect family. The Min dialects are considered with respect to geography (including maps), internal subgrouping, numbers of speakers, and mutual intelligibility. The main part of…

Papers in comparative and historical linguistics are presented. "The Independent Development of Mid Tone in Suma" (Mary Bradshaw) extends earlier research on tone change in Gbaya languages to Suma, a Gbaya language previously not included. "Diachronic Morphology: An Overview" (Brian Joseph) reviews diachronic morphological…

Classroom techniques for teaching Chinese to students in the United States are presented for four areas of instruction: pronunciation; writing; grammar; and culture. A discussion of Chinese phonology offers comparisons with English phonetic patterns and articulation, and advises emphasizing pronunciation of individual syllables. It is also…

This textbook presents the study of Chinese through the use of English grammar in the hopes of moderating the extremes of the direct method and of structural analysis. It is intended to cover a one-year course, or six semester hours of introductory Chinese. The book contains 16 lessons, of which the first seven use romanized phonetic forms and…

This document consists of the three 1988 issues of the normally quarterly journal "Notes on Linguistics." These issues include the following significant articles: "The Role of the Field Linguist" (Bernard Comrie); "Relational Grammar: An Update Report" (Stephen A. Marlett); "Tone and Stress Analysis by…

Selected papers include: "From Core to Periphery: A Study on the Directionality of Syntactic Change in Japanese" (Kaoru Horie); "On the Extension of Body-Part Nouns to Object-Part Nouns and Spatial Adpositions" (Yo Matsumoto); "Noun Classes: Language Change and Learning" (Maria Polinsky, Dan Jackson);…

This publication of proceedings, most in English and some in Chinese, of a conference on Chinese languages and linguistics include the following papers: "On Rule Effect and Dialect Classification" (Chin-Chuan Cheng); "Cross-Linguistic Typological Variation, Grammatical Relations, and the Chinese Language" (Bernard Comrie);…