The extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs has been identified as a characteristic feature of New Varieties of English across the world, including the English of black South Africans (BSAfE). This paper examines the use of the progressive aspect in BSAfE, by doing a comparative analysis of three corpora of argumentative student…

Relationships among African American English (AAE), linguistic knowledge, and spelling skills were examined in a sample of 92 children in grades one through three whose speech varied in the frequency of morphosyntactic AAE features. Children were separated into groups of high (AAE speakers) and low (standard American English, SAE, speakers) use of…

This brochure discusses, in lay terms, how computers process language and why they may have difficulty in processing English. The brochure points out that English is a more difficult language to process than most people think, and that the brain is far more complex than the computer in its ability to decipher meaning. The examples of the word…

A study of the nature and function of British Sign Language (BSL) as used in the British deaf community is described. The study examined two hypotheses: (1) that the notion of diglossia applies to the British deaf signing community, and (2) that the low variety of BSL will exploit the visual medium in its grammar to a greater extent than the high…

The variable usage of Negative Incorporation as a phonological process in French Sign Language (FSL) and as a grammatical process in American Sign Language (ASL) is described. In addition, the historical continuum between FSL and ASL despite heavy restructuring is shown. (HP)

Written in Spanish, the article discusses the transformational grammar of the Spanish used by Chicanos. (NQ)

Several hypotheses are developed concerning the semantic-pragmatic shifts that take place in the development of grammatical markers such as prepositions, auxiliary verbs and sentence connectives. Over time, grammatical markers shift from being primarily referential to more pragmatic meanings, from propositional to textual to attitudinal. (PMJ)

Discusses two basic areas of difference between British and American English, namely the complementation of certain participles and the complementation of certain verbs. Complementation after "concerned" and "interested" is illustrated by several examples taken from speech and from newspaper advertisements. (AMH)

Examines crosslinguistic variation in "filler-gap dependencies" (wh-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology, and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms…

Examines some intergenerational changes in subordination (conditionals and subjunctive clauses) in a Cajun French community, exploring the gradual loss of nonindicative moods and the abandonment of finite clauses in subjunctive contexts in favor of innovative nonfinite clause types via a continuum of variation. (Author/MSE)

Attempts to resolve an outstanding question as to the most appropriate structural description of the relationship between subject and verb in Bislama (a Melanesian creole spoken in Vanuatu), discusses what the implications of this analysis might be for a Creole ontogeny, and attempts to unify this analysis to the verb system with the distribution…

Comparison of Old Spanish and present-day Spanish data provides evidence that reductive change in grammaticizing forms may be manifested not only as a diachronic process but also as a synchronic difference between formal and informal registers. (Author/VWL)

Lists the various ways superlatives may be formed in Spanish, e.g. by adding certain suffixes, by repetition of the adjective, etc. Also shows the forms and uses of superlatives at various levels of communication. (Text is in Spanish.) (TL)

Pronominalization of certain phrases in French is undergoing change. Anticipation that the newer forms will become dominant means that the rules governing /le/, /y/ and /en/ as substitutes for infinitive phrases must be rewritten. (MLA)

To create an environment which motivates students to learn the conventions of formal writing, teachers must teach children the place that these conventions have in language and in linguistic history. Principles that give students a broad picture of language are listed. (JL)