This paper draws from a number of sources, from Muhammad Ali to TV commercials, to demonstrate the quite different conceptions that black and white Americans have of the meaning of boasting and bragging. For blacks, boasting and bragging are two distinct ways of speaking and communication. Boasting is a joking, playful verbal bahavior, not to be…

LANGUAGE SAMPLES OF 20 NEGRO HEAD START CHILDREN IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WERE ANALYZED USING LEE'S (1966) DEVELOPMENTAL SENTENCE TYPES MODEL. THE TRANSFORMATIONS AND RESTRICTED FORMS OF THESE CHILDREN WERE THEN COMPARED WITH THE RESULTS THAT MENYUK (1964) OBTAINED FOR MIDDLE CLASS PRESCHOOLERS. RESULTS INDICATE THAT THE ECONOMICALLY DEPRIVED CHILD IS…

The English spoken by second generation Puerto Ricans in Harlem is influenced by black English heard in the surrounding community, standard English used in the school, and the Spanish-influenced English used by the first generation Puerto Rican community. The study of these influences is conducted according to recently developed sociolinguistic…

This paper focuses attention on the kinds of research assumptions that are present in the literature on language, and which can be found in the "myths" about family structure and motivation. Three major professions are concerned with describing the language and cognitive abilities of black children--(1) educators, who believe these…

Forty-five papers on linguistic theory and language research from the annual conference address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; agreement languages; grammatical relations; syntax; phonology; grammar; contrastive linguistics; second language learning; syntax; quotations; topic management; aphasia; interpersonal communication; laughter;…

This study develops specific facts about the nature of the Black English "lingua franca" which formed on the American eastern seaboard in the last half of the eighteenth century. Accepting an assumption that American English of this period was levelling into a "koine," this investigation attempts to characterize the consonant loss and substitution…

It is the intent of this Master's Thesis to describe the nonstandard morphology and syntax of a representative sample of children in the Norfolk City schools. The description is organized according to the linguistic patterning of nonstandard English features and their social and ethnic distribution. The speech of both white and Negro children is…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the language in a Spanish bilingual reading classroom; (2) the early stages of language acquisition of black children; (3) the dependency relation between oral…

This study describes the syntactic features of Black English Vernacular (BEV) spoken by black characters in three black situation comedies on American television: "The Jeffersons,""Good Times," and "What's Happening." Using scripts and audio tapes of three episodes from each series during the 1977-78 television season, transcripts were made of…

This book consists of the 29 papers presented at the Conference on Child Language co-sponsored by the Center for Applied Linguistics and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in Chicago in November of 1971. The subject of the conference was restricted to the learning of two or more languages or dialects by young children,…

Appraised objectively in this article is a 3-year research project that involved experimentation with audiolingual methods in teaching standard English in Freshman English classes at Chaflin College in South Carolina to Negro students who spoke a nonstandard dialect. Prior to a discussion of the effectiveness of using spelling instruction to teach…

This volume contains an edited version of the papers presented at a 1969 conference called by the Center for Applied Linguistics in an effort to provide information to researchers, teachers, and administrators from various fields who have seen social dialects as contributing to the complexity of their disciplines. Ten scholars represented the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the English reading competence of Navajo students in public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools; (2) the effect of syntax on readability for Spanish-speaking…

Essays on English in South Africa and its neighboring countries include: "A History of English in South Africa" (Len Lanham); "English in South African Society: A Preliminary Overview" (Bill Branford); "Black English in South Africa" (David Gough); "Language Contact, Transmission, Shift: South African Indian…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 12 titles deal with the following topics: the acquisition of bilingualism by infants and young children; psycholinguistic abilities of American Indian children; effects of creative dramatics on oral language abilities and self…