The study of the history of the English language can help students become aware of major issues in several academic fields, including history, literature, political science, anthropology, communication, economics, the Arts, and, of course, languages and linguistics. Even though instructors may not have an especially broad background in the…

The nature and use of names are the focus of a resarch report published in a Canadian journal. The article presents the results of a study of college and university sports teams' nicknames, including major categories of names (human, animal world, mythical, etc.), and frequency of names. The report concludes with a discussion of the social…

Investigates the comprehension of combined concepts (such as "peeled apple") in discourse through four experiments by having people verify features that were true of the phrase. Discusses experiments and results. Argues against a compositional model of conceptual combination in which both the modifier and head noun are accessed…

Argues that words with different meanings normally appear in discriminably different contexts, and that the cue for learning to associate direct antonyms is not their substitutability but rather their frequent co-occurrence in the same sentence. (Author/VWL)

Proposes an alternative model of language comprehension regarding how people understand idioms in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variance. Presents three experiments on how people process variant idioms. (SR)

Discusses the beginning of the ascendancy of the language sciences in the past 50 years to become the "queen" of social studies. Focuses on contributions by Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Noam Chomsky, Erving Goffman, and Michael Halliday. (SC)

Investigates creation and interpretation of nonlexicalized categories within discourse, as indicated by the use of general extenders. Shows that such categories are locally contingent, depend on contextually salient features for identifying similarity among members, can be created through contrast or contiguity, and clearly depend on assumptions…

Lexical bundles--recurrent sequences of words--are important building blocks of discourse in spoken and written registers. Previous research has shown that lexical bundles are especially prevalent in university classroom teaching, where they serve three major discourse functions: stance expressions, discourse organizers, and referential…

Discusses why some schools chose the dial access retrieval system medium, how it was utilized and modified, and why it succeeded or failed. (EKN)

Concludes that (1) conditions that precipitate vocabulary acquisition (appealing sound, "adultness," strong emotion, peer usage) are closely associated with both social affect and social environment and that (2) words are rarely learned as a result of traditional teaching methods. (FL)

Describes general changes in sentence length, typical clause and modifier patterns, connectedness and structural explicitness over the last 400 years. Finds that the printed sentence has become shorter, the flow of information more direct, and the connections between nominalizations more implicit. Suggests that the printed sentence will continue…

Investigates the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in choice of a name when referring to a third person during a conversation. Concludes that the social information inherent in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. (HB)

Finds that zero quotatives (where direct speech is reported with neither a reporting verb nor an attributed speaker) are found when a speaker is clearly constructing attitude; where the omission of a quotative may serve some dramatic effect; and at sights where conversational partners are displaying strongly convergent behavior. (SR)

Suggests that two components of natural discourse (pragmatic information and knowledge about discourse style) play a role in memory for the surface form of sentences in discourse. Shows that recognition memory increased as a function of information about the speaker's positive and negative attitudes and that substantial verbatim memory was…

Lists and discusses the most prominent forms of interlingual transfer and the subtle relationships that exist between the various types. Argues that proximity and situationality are important factors which may come to play a more prominent role in future work in translatology. (HB)