Presents an analysis of the structure of a German conversation, detailing the complexity of culturally and situationally appropriate structure and meaning in casual conversational discourse. The pedagogical implications suggested through first-year classroom activities are explored. (23 references) (Author/CB)

The applicability of the notion of "speech community" in urban centers where considerable dialect mixing takes place is discussed. Labov's model is examined and four speech community criteria are emphasized: nativeness of speech community members, uniform patterns of linguistic variation, shared evaluation of features, and close…

This document shares Dr. Walt Wolfram's views on African-American Dialect. He states that the most elementary principle is that all language is patterned and rule-governed, and one can apply that principle to African-American English, Appalachian English, and to every other dialect that is examined.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Earlier sociolinguistic studies distinguish between Standard English and Black English with respect to indirect question formation. Standard English typically does not invert the tense-marker "do" in the imbedded question ("Ask John if he played basketball today") while Black English does ("Ask John did he play basketball today"). In fact, the…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the kinds of responses people produce during wrong-number telephone calls and to discover the rules that appear to govern the choices of the responses and their relationships. Fifty-seven calls were placed at different times during the day over a period of several weeks. The sentences used to…

In analyzing utterances whose singular property is to become true simply by being uttered, this article discusses the theory of explicit performatives and proposes an alternative explanation which focuses on meaning rather than on the fact of these utterances are speech acts. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

Challenges the notion that a lexical code or argot necessarily defines the parameters of a sub-cultural group, and illustrates the challenge with a discussion of language particular to the homosexual community. (CLK)

A presentation of a rigorous method allowing an accurate description of collective bilingualism in any given population, including both the speaker's degree of language command and the patterns of linguistic behavior in each of the languages. [In Spanish] (NQ)

This analysis of the Nambiquara languages spoken by American Indians living in Brazil focuses on the phonological systems, the phonological reflexes, Proto-Nambiquara vocabulary and non-cognate vocabulary, and geographical distribution. Comparisons are made with published sources. (SW)

Explores the relational aspects of speech and markers which point up relational aspects according to the pupil's adjustment to his peer group and its activities and to institutional aspects of school life. (Text is in French.) (CDSH/CLK)

Deals with patterns of limited borrowing in Tarahumara, or Raramuri, a Uto-Aztecan language in northern Mexico. Probes the sociolinguistic constraints that have apparently caused Raramuri to have borrowed surprisingly little from Spanish. (Author/RM)

Article also appeared in "International Journal of the Sociology of Language," n1; research supported by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Ford Foundation, and The Language Behavior Secion, Hebrew University. (DD)

Paper presented at the Panel on Chinese Local Studies, Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, New York, N.Y., 1972. (DD)