Despite the social turn in views of language and the increasing attention to an application of genre theory in teaching languages, the field of Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) has not yet found genre a valuable resource for approaching learners' writing ability. Writing is still practiced as a psycholinguistic space to check learners'…

Effective usage of nonverbal and verbal communication in Japanese such as gestures, mimics, silence and employing grammatical or lexical honorifics plays a significant role in determining the success of foreign language learners in obtaining their intended employment. This study examines the second language (L2) learning of politeness and social…

Through the presentation of two bilingual reader profiles, this article will illustrate how miscue analysis can act as a culturally relevant assessment tool as it allows for the study of reading across different spoken and written languages. The research presented in this article integrates a socio-psycholinguistic perspective to reading and a…

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by…

This article reports on a crosslinguistic comparative study of the processing of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) by Chinese-, Sinhalese-, Vietnamese-, Thai-, and Indonesian-speaking second language (L2) learners. A robust finding in studies on the acquisition of RCs in L2 English and other European languages is that subject-gap RCs are easier than…

The communication of "person" has been a particularly elusive area of Japanese discourse. The elusive status of the person term (as distinguished from the Indo-European personal pronoun) raises the question of whether such terms, along with titles, kin terms, proper names, age-status terms, and zero forms, may all be part of a single…

Examines current theories of language change, and proposes the theory that language change can be observed and captured while in progress, and that language change can be considered a manifestation of human change in general. (AM)

The successful decoding of a linguistic message requires knowledge of a particular grammar, but it is becoming increasingly clear that contextual and cultural cues also play an important role in conversation. In Japanese, conversation proceeds smoothly and acquires some of its meaningfulness from the use of gestural signals, particularly head…

This issue includes the following articles: "Assimilation to the Unmarked" (Eric Bakovic); "On the Non-Universality of Functional Projections and the Effects on Parametrized Variation: Evidence from Creoles" (Marlyse Baptista); "What Turkish Acquisition Tells Us about Underlying Word Order and Scrambling" (Natalie…

The process of learning a language is a long and arduous one. The spoken word is only a part of communication, and socio-pragmatics is increasingly recognized as a key element in language learning. More and more Americans are becoming aware of the gap between grammatical proficiency and cultural fluency as they strive to do business in our global…

This volume contains working papers on a variety of topics in linguistics. They include: "A View of Phonology from a Cognitive and Functional Perspective" (Joan Bybee); "The Geography of Language Shift: Distance from the Mexican Border and Spanish Language Claiming in the Southwestern United States" (Garland D. Bills, Eduardo…

This edited volume includes the following chapters: "Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics and SLA: A Psycholinguistic Perspective" (Dennis R. Preston); "Getting Serious about Language Play: Language Play, Interlanguage Variation, and Second Language Acquisition" (Elaine Tarone); "Oppositional Talk and the Acquisition of Modality in L2 English" (Tom…

Fourteen original research papers by faculty and students of the Linguistics Department and other related departments of the University of Kansas are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "A Kinesic Approach to Understanding Communication and Context in Japanese" (Bruch); "Correlations between the Three Level Tones and…

The 1999 issues of "Notes on Linguistics," published quarterly, include the following articles, review articles, reviews, book notices, and reports: "A New Program for Doing Morphology: Hermit Crab"; "Lingualinks CD-ROM: Field Guide to Recording Language Data"; "'Unruly' Phonology: An Introduction to Optimality Theory"; "Borrowing vs. Code…